"Do you want to know what Sorenson did?" he demanded, wrathfully.

Janet gripped her hands together. "Yes."

"You'll not go spreading it all around the country? But I guess you
won't as long as it would make you out a fool too. I'll not have
Mary's name dragged about in a lot of gossip."

"I assure you I shall remain silent, for her sake and my own."

"All right, I'll tell you. You're too good a girl--any decent girl
is--to marry Ed Sorenson. He met Mary at a dance last spring in town
where she went with some friends of ours, and made love to her but
wouldn't let her tell me or any one. We don't get to town so very
often; she never knew he was engaged to marry you, there never
happening to be any mention of it to her. Then he got her to go to
Bowenville one day awhile ago, under promise to marry her there--Mary
is only sixteen, a little girl yet. To me, anyway."

Janet felt the working of his love in those simple words. Felt it but
half-consciously, though, for her own soul was stifling at Ed
Sorenson's revealed infamy.

"When he got her there, he told her they would have to go away farther
to be married--to Los Angeles." Again his finger came up, this time to
be shaken at her like a hammer. "He never intended to marry her; he
planned to get her there, ruin her, and cast her off. That's the sort
of man you're going to marry!"

"I remember he expected to be away for a couple of weeks--a business
trip, he said. But afterwards he explained that it hadn't been
necessary to go."

"A business trip! Yes, the dirty kind of business he likes. And if it
hadn't been that Weir heard him explaining to Mary that she must go on
and interfered--there in the restaurant--Ed Sorenson might have
succeeded. Mary trusted him, thought he was straight. But he's
crooked, crooked as his old man. When Weir told him to his face what
he thought of his tricks, he let it out he was engaged to you. Didn't
mean to, of course. Weir said he would stay right with them and see
that they got married next day before a minister, then Sorenson
snapped out he was to marry you. That opened Mary's eyes, that and his
refusing to go before a preacher as the engineer demanded. So Weir
brought her home to me.

"And that isn't all I know," he snarled. "Mexicans and cowboys and
others have talked--women don't hear these things--how he's had to
pay Mexicans hush-money for girls of theirs he's wronged. But what do
people care? He's rich, he's old man Sorenson'