Slone took the letter with trembling fingers. All the fury and gloom instantly fled. Lucy had written him! He could not speak.
"Son, I'm double-crossin' the boss, right this minnit!" whispered Holley, hoarsely. "An' the same time I'm playin' Lucy's game. If Bostil finds out he'll kill me. I mustn't be ketched up here. But I won't lose track of you—wherever you go."
Holley slipped away stealthily in the dusk, leaving Slone with a throbbing heart.
"Wherever you go!" he echoed. "Ah! I forgot! I can't stay here."
Lucy's letter made his fingers tingle—made them so hasty and awkward that he had difficulty in kindling blaze enough to see to read. The letter was short, written in lead-pencil on the torn leaf of a ledger. Slone could not read rapidly—those years on the desert had seen to that—and his haste to learn what Lucy said bewildered him. At first all the words blurred:
"Come at once to the bench in the cottonwoods. I'll meet you there. My heart is breaking. It's a lie—a lie—what they say. I'll swear you were with me the night the boat was cut adrift. I KNOW you didn't do that. I know who.... Oh, come! I will stick to you. I will run off with you. I love you!"
CHAPTER XV
Slone's heart leaped to his throat, and its beating choked his utterances of rapture and amaze and dread. But rapture dominated the other emotions. He could scarcely control the impulse to run to meet Lucy, without a single cautious thought.
He put the precious letter inside his blouse, where it seemed to warm his breast. He buckled on his gun-belt, and, extinguishing the light, he hurried out.