But Basil wanted to hear one thing first. “How is she?” he demanded.
“They say she is better now, although the shock was great. It was I who had to break the news to her …. They killed him down at the lower end of the town, outside the mestizo’s house. We suppose it was the head-hunters, for we never found the head.”
“I have the head, at Calocan,” Basil said and told him of Felizardo’s letter.
Before they went to bed that night, they had arranged the matter. Amongst white men, Basil and Father Doyle and Don Juan Ramirez alone knew the truth, and there was no reason why any one else, save perhaps Mrs Bush, need know. So, officially, Captain Bush met his end at the hands of a stray party of head-hunters whilst going his rounds; and they granted a pension to the widow, which, afterwards, she refused to take.
Mrs Bush rose with a cry of glad surprise when they told her Basil was downstairs; and she hurried into the room with hands outstretched. “Oh! I was praying you would come when you heard of it,” she said. “I should have gone mad with no one to speak to.”
He bent down and kissed her hands. “My Lady,” he said.
And then they understood one another at last, because the bar to their understanding, that which would have made it a sin before, had been removed, in accordance with the Law of the Bolo.