The Forfeit Part 26

"I'm through, sweetheart," he said. "Shall we----?"

But Elvine's feelings would no longer be denied.

"Serious as all that?" she demanded. The next moment she would have given worlds to have been able to recall the words.

"I'm afraid it is--in a way."

Elvine had no option but to continue the subject. She spoke with real feeling.

"May I know, dear?" she appealed. "You see, Jeff, things often read worse than they are. Maybe I can help. I've a clearer head than you'd guess."

The man's cheeks flushed. He had distressed her, frightened her, and the thought of it annoyed him. He stepped toward her, his hands outheld. She responded, and her hands were caught in his firm warm clasp.

"Say, I'm just sorry. I surely am. Guess I've no sort of right scaring you. Anyway, there's nothing to be scared about. Just a bunch of rustlers----"

"Cattle thieves?"

The woman's whole expression had become transformed. The announcement had shocked her out of her self-possession. Her smile had fled. Her eyes were wide, and their dark depths were full of a horror that seemed quite uncalled for. Even her cheeks had lost their delicate bloom.

Her gaze was held fast by the man's steady regard. It was almost a fascinated stare held under some powerful hypnotic influence.

The man was at a loss. But he promptly claimed the fault to himself.

"Don't just worry a thing, Evie," he cried, in real distress. "It don't amount to anything. And anyway you don't need to worry. We can deal with it. I best tell you right away. You see, it's their second play since I've been from home. Bud's feeling sore. First it was a great imported bull they shot up while they ran off his cows, and a dandy bunch of yearling prize stock. Now--now it's a swell bunch of fifty beeves that had been fattening for the buyers. The loss don't hurt. Oh, no, it's not that."

He paused. Somehow their hands fell apart, and, to the woman, now recovering herself, it was as though some shadow had thrust itself between them. She waited, vaguely troubled. Somehow speech for the moment had become impossible to her. She was thinking, thinking far back amidst scenes she had no desire to recall.

Her husband went on. His manner had lost all the contrition he had displayed at alarming her. It was abstracted. He too seemed to be thinking deeply, far away amidst scenes which afforded him only the deepest pain.

"I've just thought," he said. Then he raised one strong hand and pa.s.sed it across his broad forehead. He drew a profound sigh. "Say, I wonder," he went on reflectively. "It's things Bud's said in his yarn.

Suspicions. They brought up all sorts of queer things to my mind."

The smile he essayed was a hopeless failure. Then, in a moment, all doubt seemed to pa.s.s away and he spoke with quick, keen decision.

"I'll have to tell you, Evie. You'd sort of made me forget. These days have been the happiest I've ever known, and you've made 'em so.

That's how I forgot to tell you of things I guess you ought to know."

But the woman before him had no desire for his present mood. She smilingly shook her head in a decided negative. The last thing she desired was anything in the nature of a confidence.

"Is there any need--now?" she asked. Then she smiled. "The stores are waiting."

But she had yet to learn the real character of the man whom she had married. She had yet to understand the meaning of the simple sobriquet "Honest Jeff," which Nan Tristram had long since bestowed upon him. He was not the man to be turned from a decision once taken. The decision on this occasion was arrived at through the depth of the pa.s.sionate devotion which controlled his every thought. His love for Elvine made his purpose only the more irrevocable.

"I think they had best wait a shade longer," he said with a shadowy smile. "You see, Evie, I kind of figure there's things that matter more than just gathering in the fancy goods money'll buy--even for you.

Guess I owe you most everything a man can give, the same as you feel toward me. That's how marriage--marriage like ours--seems to me. As far as I can make it there's not going to be a thing on my conscience toward you. I'd have told you this before, only--only you just drove it right out of my head with the sight of your beautiful face, the sound of your voice, which I just love, and the thought that you--you were to be my wife. You see," he went on simply, "I hadn't room in my head for anything else."

His manner was so firmly gentle that Elvine's protest melted before it.

After all it was very sweet, and--and---- She drew a chair forward and sat down. But her smile hid her real feelings. Confidences, confessions, even from a husband, were repugnant to her.

Jeff remained standing. He gazed for a few silent moments in the direction of the open window. The expression of his blue eyes suggested a deep, searching introspection. He might have been searching for an opening. Again, he might simply have been reviewing scenes which stirred his innermost soul with their horror and pain.

At last, however, Elvine made a half impatient movement. Instantly the blue eyes turned in her direction, and their expression startled her.

They were full of a stony, pa.s.sionless regard. Not for her, but inspired by the thought behind them. She s.h.i.+vered under their gaze and their impression upon her was never afterward obliterated.

"It's four years past now," he began, in a voice she scarcely recognized. "These rustlers brought it all back to me. Say, Evie, I had a twin brother, Ronald. Maybe that won't convey much. I sort of loved him--better than myself. That's all. He was a bit queer. I mean he just didn't care a heap for running along the main trail of things. He was apt to get all mussed up running around byways. Well, when Bud and I fixed up the Obar partners.h.i.+p, I was just crazy to hunt Ronny down, and hand him a share. Bud's a great feller, and I told him. I knew whereabouts the boy had staked out, and, figuring we'd earned a vacation, Bud and I set out to round him up, and hand him a piece which I guessed would keep him with me the rest of his life."

He paused. He drew a deep breath, and his eyes, hard as marble, had turned again in the direction of the window.

Elvine was held even against herself. The expression of his eyes, even more than the curious sharpness of his voice, troubled her, alarmed her.

"I'm not going to yarn more than necessary," he went on after a moment.

"There isn't any need. I just want to give you the deadly facts. As I said, I knew his layout, where he was--supposed to be trapping pelts.

Supposed. Bud had been raised in the district, so he acted scout. He made the location and found him. D'you know how?"

There was a restrained fierceness in the sharp demand.

The woman shook her head. Any word would have seemed out of place.

"Hanging by the neck to the bough of a tree."

"Jeff, don't!" the woman gasped.

But now there was a smile in the man's eyes. It was a terrible smile which drove every vestige of color from his wife's cheeks.

"I had to tell you," he cried harshly. "They hanged him for a cattle thief. He was one. Oh, yes. He was one. That's why I had to tell you."

The woman's eyes were wide with a sudden terror to which the man remained oblivious.

"But you said----"

"I said he was pelt hunting. So he'd told me. So I believed. But he wasn't. Say, he was a cattle rustler running a big gang who'd played h.e.l.l with the district. He'd been running it for nigh five years.

He'd beaten 'em to a mush, all that time, till a reward was offered. A reward of ten thousand dollars. That fixed him. There was some one knew wanted that reward, and--got it."

There was a sudden movement in the room. Elvine had abruptly risen from her chair. She moved away. She crossed to the window, and stood with her back turned, and so had thrust herself into her husband's focus.

"It's--it's a terrible--dreadful story," came her faltering comment.

"Terrible? Dreadful?" The man emitted a sound that might have been a laugh. A shudder pa.s.sed down the woman's back as it fell upon her ears. "But it's nothing to the reality, Evie. Oh, I've no sympathy for his crimes. I hate rustlers like the poison they are. But he was twin to me, and I loved him. It made no difference to me. You see, he was part of me. Now--now I only hope the good G.o.d'll let me come up with the man who took the price of his blood. For four years I've dreamed that way, and I guess it don't matter if it's fifty more. I'll never change. There's some one, somewhere, who's lower down than the worst cattle rustler ever lived."

There was no response as the man ceased speaking. Elvine had not stirred from her place at the window. The moments pa.s.sed. Swift, poignant moments, in which two people were enduring an agony of recollection.

The man's relentless expression never changed. His eyes were gazing straight ahead. And though his vision was obstructed by the perfect contours of his wife's figure, he was gazing through her, and beyond her, upon a scene which had for its central interest the suspended figure of a man with his head lolling forward and sideways, and his dead eyes bulging from their sockets.

Elvine never stirred. Her gaze was upon the crowded thoroughfare beyond. But like her husband, she was gazing through and beyond. She was watching the tongues of flame as they licked up the resinous trunks and foliage of a great pine bluff.

At length it was the woman's voice broke the silence.

"Where--where did this all happen?"

The question was the verbal expression of a despairing hope. The voice, however, was steady.