She turned back and tossed the pistol behind the bar, and the crowd, as if her words and the advice of the more contained element prevailed, resumed its play. She looked up, and saw the partners waiting to bid her good-night, and suddenly bit her lip, as if ashamed that they had seen her fury unmasked.
“We’re going now,” Bill said, reaching out his hand. She did not take it, but looked around the room with unreadable eyes.
“I’ll walk with you to the beginning of your trail,” she said. “I’m sick of this,” and led the way out into the night.
For half the length of the long street, she strode between them, wordless, and then suddenly 127 halted and held her arms apart appealingly.
“What must you think of me?” she said, with a note of grief in her voice. “Oh, you two don’t know it all! You don’t know what it takes to make a woman, who tries to be decent, rebellious at everything under the skies. What brutes there are walking the earth! Sometimes, lately, I begin to doubt if there is a God!”
“And that,” exclaimed the quiet, steadfast young voice at her side, “is unworthy of you and your intelligence.”
She halted again, as if thinking.
“And I,” said the giant, in his deep, musical tones, “know there’s one. It takes more than men to make me believe there ain’t. I know it when I look at them!” He waved his hands at the starlit mountains surrounding them, and towering in serenity high up to the cloudless spaces.
“I’d be mighty ashamed to doubt when I can see them,” he said, “and if they went away, I’d still believe it; because if I didn’t, I couldn’t see no use in livin’ any more. It’s havin’ Him lean down and whisper to you once in a while, in the night, when everything seems to be goin’ wrong, ‘Old boy, you did well,’ that keeps it all 128 worth while and makes a feller stiffen his back and go ahead, with his conscience clean and not carin’ a cuss what anybody says or thinks, so longs as he knows that the Lord knows he did the right thing.”
She faltered for a moment, and Dick, staring through the darkness at her, could not decide whether it was because the woman in her was melting after the storm of anger, or whether she was merely weighing his partner’s words. As abruptly as had been any of her actions in all the time they had known her, she turned and walked away from them, her soft “Good-night” wafting itself back with a note of profound sadness and misery.