“It is really I—Bess Fletcher! I have been saved from ignominy by Grace Morton’s living death—by the broken heart of Helen West.”
“You knew!” gasped Henry West, stepping back abruptly.
“How could I have known? Fate, at an almost fatal moment, disclosed the perfidy which you had so cowardly concealed.”
“Yes, a coward—a damned coward, who could not tell of his only sister’s dishonor to save you—even you, from a life of misery! Since early dawn have I fought here for the courage to go to you, to tell you, but I dared not; had I seen that—that dog again, he would have been killed,” came in a frenzied outburst, as Henry clasped his hand over his holster. “This same bullet has been waiting—for nearly two years,” he said, as he withdrew the gun and held it in his palm.
Bess reached out her hand. Taking the treacherous weapon and emptying the chambers, she gave it back to West. “There, Henry, you will not need it now; he has gone.”
“Gone! Yes, I was told yesterday that his resignation was not voluntary; another man is already at the agency to fill the position.”
“Where are you going alone?” asked Henry West, as the girl remounted and turned Mauchacho’s head toward the rugged north shore of the lake.
“Where my horse may take me. Your mother is looking for you at home,” answered Miss Fletcher, in a hard voice, as she bent her head beneath the branches of a small pine and rode away.
West stood watching her as she now and again came into view from behind a clump of bushes or around some jagged rocks, trying to clear the mist from his brain and eyes, and assuring himself that she was not an hallucination. At length he took the reins from the ground and led his horse back to the ranch. No one saw him enter the house nor go to his room; and when he joined the others late in the afternoon no one dreamed that the tall, dark man, so immaculately dressed, so calm and quiet, had a moment of anguish.