“If you won’t tell me it must mean she’s still alive,” he replied, swiftly. “She’s not dead;... I’ll find her. I’ll make her come back to me—or kill her... After all these years—to leave me!”
He seemed wrestling with mingled emotions. The man was proud and strong, but defeat in life, in the crowning passion of life, showed in his white face. The evil in him was not manifest then.
“Where have you lived all this time?” he asked, presently.
“Back in the hills with a trapper.”
“You have grown. When I saw you I thought it was the ghost of your mother. You are just as she was when we met.”
He seemed lost in sad retrospection. Allie saw streaks of gray in his once jet-black hair.
“What will you do?” asked Allie.
He was startled. The softness left him. A blaze seemed to leap under skin and eyes, and suddenly he was different—he was Durade the gambler, instinct with the lust of gold and life.
“Your mother left me for YOU,” he said, with terrible bitterness. “And the game has played you into my hands. I’ll keep you. I’ll hold you to get even with her.”
Allie felt stir in her the fear she had had of him in her childhood when she disobeyed. “But you can’t keep me against my will—not among people we’ll meet eastward.”