“And I have the newspaper since with an account of the wedding.... Ban! Don’t look like that!”
“Like what?” said he stupidly.
“You look like Pretty Willie as I saw him when he was working himself up for the killing.” Pretty Willie was the soft-eyed young desperado who had cleaned out the Sick Coyote.
“Oh, I’m not going to kill anybody,” he said with a touch of grim amusement for her fears. “Not even myself.” He rose and went to the door. “Do you mind, Miss Camilla?” he added appealingly.
“You want me to leave you now?”
He nodded. “I’ve got to think.”
“When would you leave, Ban, if you do go?”
“I don’t know.”
On the following morning he went, after a night spent in arranging, destroying, and burning. The last thing to go into the stove, 67 S 4230, was a lock of hair, once glossy, but now stiffened and stained a dull brown, which he had cut from the wound on Io’s head that first, strange night of theirs, the stain of her blood that had beaten in her heart, and given life to the sure, sweet motion of her limbs, and flushed in her cheeks, and pulsed in the warm lips that she had pressed to his—Why could they not have died together on their dissolving island, with the night about them, and their last, failing sentience for each other!
The flame of the greedy stove licked up the memento, but not the memory.