“No,” replied Isbel, earnestly. “I reckon this feud—was hardest on Jean. He never lived heah.... An’ my sister Ann said—he got sweet on y’u.... Now did he?”
Slow, stinging tears filled Ellen’s eyes, and her head sank low and lower.
“Yes—he did,” she murmured, tremulously.
“Ahuh! Wal, thet accounts,” replied Isbel, wonderingly. “Too bad! ... It might have been.... A man always sees—different when—he’s dyin’.... If I had—my life—to live over again! ... My poor kids—deserted in their babyhood—ruined for life! All for nothin’.... May God forgive—”
Then he choked and whispered for water.
Ellen laid his head back and, rising, she took his sombrero and started hurriedly down the slope, making dust fly and rocks roll. Her mind was a seething ferment. Leaping, bounding, sliding down the weathered slope, she gained the bench, to run across that, and so on down into the open canyon to the willow-bordered brook. Here she filled the sombrero with water and started back, forced now to walk slowly and carefully. It was then, with the violence and fury of intense muscular activity denied her, that the tremendous import of Bill Isbel’s revelation burst upon her very flesh and blood and transfiguring the very world of golden light and azure sky and speaking forestland that encompassed her.
Not a drop of the precious water did she spill. Not a misstep did she make. Yet so great was the spell upon her that she was not aware she had climbed the steep slope until the dog yelped his welcome. Then with all the flood of her emotion surging and resurging she knelt to allay the parching thirst of this dying enemy whose words had changed frailty to strength, hate to love, and, the gloomy hell of despair to something unutterable. But she had returned too late. Bill Isbel was dead.
CHAPTER XIII
Jean Isbel, holding the wolf-dog Shepp in leash, was on the trail of the most dangerous of Jorth’s gang, the gunman Queen. Dark drops of blood on the stones and plain tracks of a rider’s sharp-heeled boots behind coverts indicated the trail of a wounded, slow-traveling fugitive. Therefore, Jean Isbel held in the dog and proceeded with the wary eye and watchful caution of an Indian.