"All right, but it is the dead ones I'm after," the reporter said, taking the paper and pinning it to his notes.
John moved a few feet away. Again he viewed the red ruins, peering over the brink as into the heart of an active volcano. A thought had come to him, but he was irresolute. He looked back at the reporter. The man was still on the steps at work.
"It would be easy," John mused. "The simplest thing in the world, and I ought to do it. That would settle it for good and all. It would free Tilly completely, and give Dora her chance, too. Yes, I ought to do it— I really ought."
He walked about on the edge of the throng for several moments undecidedly. "What the hell is the matter with me?" he muttered. "Why can't I decide on a thing as simple as that and be done with it? It is for Tilly's lasting good. It would wipe the whole rotten thing out at once, and stop the damned wagging tongues sooner than anything else. It would sting sharply, like a doctor's knife, but it would cure the trouble. If I don't do something it will hang over her as long as she lives. I spoiled her chances by dropping into her life—here is a chance to drop out of it. I'm leaving her for good and all, anyway, so why not make a clean job of it?"
He felt that he had decided at last, and he went back to the reporter.
"Are you taking names?" he asked, in a voice the matter-of-fact tone of which surprised himself.
"Yes. Got any?" The writer did not look up from his rapidly moving pencil.
"Two friends of mine."
"All right, wait a minute."
The pencil was now rapidly producing shorthand dots, curves, and dashes. The red sky above the gorge held John's eyes. As in a picture of radiating flame he saw his little wife as he had seen her the morning he had unknowingly kissed her farewell forever on the door-step of the cottage as he stood, dinner-pail in hand, the sun just rising above the hills. In spite of his self-control and a belief in his stolidness, a lump swelled in his throat.