man with
whom she had spent the night on the prairie!

Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had
conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception. Even
the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like
two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.

A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and
clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was
his passion. He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room,
where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his
great-grandfather. He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it
for passages of violence and denunciation. Now holy superstition seized
him in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an
almost medieval instinct. He seized the ancient book, as it were to
deliver its incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing
from him that which he prized beyond all earthly things.

Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five
years, and what was left for him? She was the garden of spring in which
his old age roamed at ease luxuriously. She was the fruit of the tree of
pleasure. She was that which made him young again, renewed in him youth
and the joys of youth. Take her away, the flower that smelled so sweet
and luscious, the thing that he had held so often to his lips and to his
breast? Take away what was his, by every holy right, because it was all
according to the law of the land and of the Holy Gospel, and what was
left? Only old age, the empty house bereft of a fair young mistress,
something to smile at and to curse, if need be, since it was his own by
the laws of God and man.

Take her away, and the two wives that he had buried long years ago, with
their gray heads and lank, sour faces, from which the light of youth had
fled with the first child come to them--their ghosts would seek him out.
They would sit at his table, and taunt him with his vanished Louise,
asking him if he thought she was anything more than one of the trolls
that tempted men aforetime; one of the devil's wenches that lured him
into the secret garden, only at last to leave him scorned and alone.

Where had she gone, his troll, with the face of an angel? Where had
she gone? Where would she go, except to her devil's lover at Slow Down
Ranch?

He had just started for Slow Down Ranch armed with his greasy,
we