"Come, Honor, take this chair!" Carter urged her, bending over her.
"I don't want a chair, Cartie," she said, gently. "I'm just waiting for Jimsy." She looked up and caught the expression on Madeline King's face. "Oh, you mustn't worry," she said, contentedly. "He'll bring him back. Yaqui Juan will. He'll bring him back safe. Why, what kind of a God would that be?—To let anything happen to him, now?" Her defense was impregnable.
"Let her alone," said Mrs. King again. "She'll realize, soon enough, poor child. Stay with her, Carter. I must go back to my husband." She went away with a backward, pitying glance which yet held understanding. She knew that danger and death and thirst were smaller things than shame, this wife of a King who had held hard in her day.
Carter sat down and watched her drearily. He wasn't thinking now. He was nothing at all but one burning, choking thirst, one aching resentment ... Jimsy King, who had won, after all ... who had won alive or dead.
Honor was silent for the most part but she was wholly serene. Sometimes she spoke and her speech was harder to hear than her happy stillness. "You know, Cartie, I can be glad it happened." She seemed to speak more easily now, almost as if her thirst had been slaked; her voice was clearer, steadier. "I should never have known how much I cared. It was easy enough, wasn't it, to look at my ring and talk about 'holding hard' when there wasn't really anything to hold for? I really found out about caring to-night ... what it means. I guess I never really loved him before to-night, Carter." She was not looking at him, hardly talking to him; she seemed rather to be thinking aloud. Even if she had looked him full in the face she would not have realized what she was doing to him; there was only one realization for her now. "I guess I just loved what he was—his glorious body and his eyes and the way his hair will wave—and what he could do—the winning, the people cheering him. But to-night, when I thought—when I believed the very worst thing in the world of him—when I thought he had failed me—then I found out. Then I knew I loved—him." She leaned her head back against the arm of the chair, and her hands rested, palm upward, in her lap. "It's worth everything that's happened, to know that." She was mercifully still again. Carter thought once that she must be asleep, she was breathing so softly and evenly, but after a long pause she asked, with a shade of difference in her tone, "How long has Juan been gone, Carter?"
He looked at his watch. "Twenty minutes. Perhaps half an hour."
Honor rose to her feet. "Well, then," she said with conviction, "they'll be here soon! Any minute, now."
"They may not come." He could not help saying it.
"Oh, they'll come! They'll come very—" she stopped short at the sound of a shot. "What was that?" she asked, childishly.