"I was not one of those good women, Richard----"
He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently:
"You might have been happy--with her--if I had never come between you!"
He found some words to tell her that these things were meant to be. From the beginning ...
"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and leave you, Richard?"
He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying whisper fluttered at his lips:
He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang, remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes rolled up, and she died.
He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she could not have borne to have him leave her.
The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him praying--a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.
But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.
He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the burning blue vault of ether Who heard ... and yet, for her sake, supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even now....
_"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come...."_
And if it came, should those have any part in it who had lived together unwed in open sin?
_"Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven...."_
The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will that left him desolate and laid her away, a still fair, fast-corrupting thing, under the red earth and the great ironstone boulders!
Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the daily bread of life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many base, sordid, loveless marriages had not that illicit bond of theirs put to shame! And yet as a boy he had learned the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life hereafter, and could it--could it be that her soul was even now writhing in fires unquenchable, whither he, who would have gladly died in torment to save her from outrage or death, had thrust her?