Claim Number One Part 33

"No matter. Father's term will expire in less than one month. He is an old, broken, disgraced man; he never will be able to lift up his face before the world again. That is why I am here. Mother and I concluded that we might make a refuge for him here, where he would be unknown. We planned for him to leave his name, and as much of his past as he could shake off, behind him at the prison door.

"It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old life was gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a felon's daughter; but, worse than that--I was poor! This country held out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul."

The suns.h.i.+ne was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her h.o.a.rded sorrow and unearned shame.

"There is that freedom about it," said he, "when one sees it by day and sunlight."

"But it has its nights, too," she shuddered, the shadow of last night in her eyes.

"Yet they all pa.s.s--the longest of them and the most painful," he comforted her.

"And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of Horton, which is a family name on mother's side, not thinking what the consequence might be. Now, in payment for this first breach of the law, I must at least give up all my schemes here and retreat. I may be prosecuted; I may even go to prison, like my father did."

"Surely not!" he protested. "Who is there to know it, to lay a charge against you?"

"Such person is not wanting in the miserable plot of my life," she answered. "I will reach him soon in my sorry tale."

"Boyle!" Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. "He's the man!"

"You take the name from my mouth," she told him. "He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty."

"It might be so here," he admitted.

"I met Jerry Boyle about five years ago, when father was in Congress.

His father was at that time Senator from this state. We lived in Was.h.i.+ngton, and Jerry Boyle was then considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coa.r.s.eness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He pa.s.sed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a b.u.t.terfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I--I am afraid that I encouraged him to do it at first.

"But he drank and gambled, and got into brawls. He stabbed an attache of the Mexican Legation over a woman, and the engagement to marry him which I had entered into was broken. I was foolish in the first instance, but I plead the mitigation of frivolity and youth. My heart was not in it. I beg you to believe, Dr. Slavens, that my heart was not in it at all."

She looked at him with pleading sincerity, and from her eyes his heart gathered its recesses full of joy.

"I need no further a.s.surance of that," he smiled.

"You are generous. It was on the afternoon of the day that followed your disappearance from Comanche that Boyle came into camp there. I had not forgotten him, of course, nor his influential position in this state; but I never thought of meeting him there. It was a sickening shock to me. I denied his protestations of acquaintances.h.i.+p, but it pa.s.sed off poorly with all of them who were present, except William Bentley, generous gentleman that he is."

"He is so," testified Slavens.

"I left Comanche because I was afraid of him, but he rode post the night that I engaged pa.s.sage and beat me to Meander; but he wasn't hurrying on my account, as you know. He tried to see me there in Meander, but I refused to meet him. The day before yesterday he came here and solicited my help in carrying out a scheme. I refused. He threatened me with exposure and arrest on account of false entry and affidavit."

Agnes told then of her ride into the hills, the meeting with the herder, and subsequent events up to the shooting. But she said nothing of Boyle's base proposal to her, although her face burned at the recollection, giving Slavens more than half a guess what was behind that virtuous flame.

"And so, you poor little soul, all your plans for your City of Refuge are shattered because you refuse to sacrifice somebody to keep them whole," said he.

"No matter," she returned in that voice of abnegation which only a long marching line of misfortunes can give a woman or a man command over. "I have decided, anyway, to give it up. It's too big and rough and lonesome for me."

"And that person whom you put up your heart and soul to s.h.i.+eld," he went on, looking steadily into her face and pursuing his former thought, "has something in his possession which this man Boyle covets and thinks he must have? And the cheapest and easiest way to get it is to make you pay for it in the violation of your honest principles, if he can drive you to it in his skulking way?"

She bowed a.s.sent, her lips tightly set.

"Yes," said he. "Just so. Well, why didn't Boyle come to me with his threats, the coward!"

"No, no!" she cried in quick fright. "Not that; it is something--something else."

"You poor dissembler!" he laughed. "You couldn't be dishonest if you wanted to the worst way in the world. Well, don't you worry; I'll take it up with him today."

"You'll _not_ give it up!" she exclaimed vehemently. "All your hopes are there, and it's yours, and _you'll not_ give it up!"

"Never mind," he soothed, again taking her hand, which she had withdrawn to aid in emphasizing her protest. "I don't believe he'd carry out his threats about the United States marshal and all that."

"You'll not give it up to him unless he pays you for it," she reiterated, ignoring her own prospect of trouble. "It's valuable, or he wouldn't be so anxious to get it."

"Perhaps," Slavens a.s.sented.

"I'm going to leave here," she hurriedly pursued. "It was foolish of me to come, in the first place. The vastness of it bewildered me, and 'the lonesomeness,' as Smith calls it, is settling in my heart."

"Well, where will you go?" he asked bewilderedly.

"Somewhere--to some village or little farm, where we can raise poultry, mother and I."

"But I haven't planned it that way," Slavens smiled. "If you leave, what am I going to do?"

"I don't know," she acknowledged, "unless--unless you come some time."

"Look here, Agnes," said he, taking the matter entirely in hand. "When we leave this place, we'll leave together. I've arranged that all in my mind and intention. It's all disposed of and settled. Here comes Boyle now, I think."

Boyle left his horse standing a few rods distant and came over to where they sat.

"You look comfortable," he commented, as serene and unperturbed as if the load of one more human life on his soul were a matter too light to be felt with inconvenience.

"Very comfortable," answered Slavens, rising stiffly. "We have nothing on our hands that common water will not wash off."

"Oh, that nut!" depreciated Boyle. "He'd talked around for a year or two about getting me. I only beat him to it when he tried; that's all."

"But there was another occasion--another attempt that didn't turn out quite like you intended," said Slavens. "Do you remember me?"

"Yes; you're the tin-horn doctor that held a man up in Comanche and stole the coat off of his back," Boyle retorted with easy insolence.

Agnes looked at the doctor imploringly, plainly begging him not to provoke Boyle to another outbreak of violence. She was standing beside him, the fear and loathing which Boyle's presence aroused undisguised in her frank face.

"It was an outrage against one of the honest men who tried to murder me," said the doctor. "But, vicious as it was, neither Shanklin nor you, his side-partner, has ever made a squeal. If it was a holdup, why haven't you sent one of your little sheriffs out after me?"

"I'm no partner of Hun Shanklin's!" denied Boyle.

"Maybe you've parted company since the night you slugged me and nailed me up in that box for the river to hide your work."

"I'll make you prove that charge!" threatened Boyle hotly.

"I can't prove it," admitted the doctor. "If I could, I'd have you in court tomorrow. But you were one of them, and I want you to understand fully that I know it, and will treat you accordingly in any private dealings that may come up between you and me."