s not
good to rouse in frontier lands. It is sure to exhibit itself in forms
more objective than are found in great populations where methods of
punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined. But
society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back on
primary ways and means. La Touche was no exception, and the keener
spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced
in his good-luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his own
whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval of
Constantine Jopp's conduct. Though it was pointed out to them by the
astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the colossal
joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole truth
concerning the past of the two men. They realized that Fergus and Holden
had been duped by Jopp into the escapade. Their primitive sense of justice
exonerated the humorists and arraigned the one malicious man. As the night
wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out by La Touche to the
man who had not "acted on the square."

Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to appease
as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening. He would have
enjoyed the _battue_ of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he
knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the
half-savage penalty they meant to exact. He had determined that O'Ryan
should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path. It was
true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man--one of the richest in the West,
unless all signs failed; but, meanwhile, a union of fortunes would only be
an added benefit. Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in earnest, and
what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly. He was not
concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence. He guessed that Terry had ridden
away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on him, to have
it out with himself. Gow Johnson was a philosopher. He was twenty years
older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as a pious monk his
missal.

He was right in his judgment. When Terry left the theatre he was like one
in a dream, every nerve in his body at tension, his head aflame, his
pulses throbbing. For miles he rode away into the waste along the northern
trail, ever away from La Touche and his own home. He did not know of the
great good-fortune that had come to him