“Sounded to me up on the bluff, back pretty far.”
“Wal, shore that’s my idee. An’ it makes me think hard. Y’u know Somers come across the last camp of the Isbels. An’ he dug into a grave to find the bodies of Jim Gordon an’ another man he didn’t know. Queen kept good his brag. He braced that Isbel gang an’ killed those fellars. But either him or Jean Isbel went off leavin’ bloody tracks. If it was Queen’s y’u can bet Isbel was after him. An’ if it was Isbel’s tracks, why shore Queen would stick to them. Somers an’ Springer couldn’t follow the trail. They’re shore not much good at trackin’. But for days they’ve been ridin’ the woods, hopin’ to run across Queen.... Wal now, mebbe they run across Isbel instead. An’ if they did an’ got away from him they’ll be heah sooner or later. If Isbel was too many for them he’d hunt for my trail. I’m gamblin’ that either Queen or Jean Isbel is daid. I’m hopin’ it’s Isbel. Because if he ain’t daid he’s the last of the Isbels, an’ mebbe I’m the last of Jorth’s gang.... Shore I’m not hankerin’ to meet the half-breed. That’s why I say we’ll stay heah. This is as good a hidin’ place as there is in the country. We’ve grub. There’s water an’ grass.”
“Me—stay heah with y’u—alone!”
The tone seemed a contradiction to the apparently accepted sense of her words. Jean held his breath. But he could not still the slowly mounting and accelerating faculties within that were involuntarily rising to meet some strange, nameless import. He felt it. He imagined it would be the catastrophe of Ellen Jorth’s calm acceptance of Colter’s proposition. But down in Jean’s miserable heart lived something that would not die. No mere words could kill it. How poignant that moment of her silence! How terribly he realized that if his intelligence and his emotion had believed her betraying words, his soul had not!
But Ellen Jorth did not speak. Her brown head hung thoughtfully. Her supple shoulders sagged a little.
“Ellen, what’s happened to y’u?” went on Colter.
“All the misery possible to a woman,” she replied, dejectedly.
“Shore I don’t mean that way,” he continued, persuasively. “I ain’t gainsayin’ the hard facts of your life. It’s been bad. Your dad was no good.... But I mean I can’t figger the change in y’u.”
“No, I reckon y’u cain’t,” she said. “Whoever was responsible for your make-up left out a mind—not to say feeling.”
Colter drawled a low laugh.