ror
of it. A long time she gazed dumbly at the sheets, then once more she
laughed the old, low laugh, with a sinister note in it now. Ben Crider
found her there an hour later, staring blankly out over the flawed
surface of the lake. The breeze was swirling many finely torn bits of
paper about her feet.

As they walked back to the cabin she reflected that the letter had lain
four days in the postoffice at Pagosa. It had been written nine days
before. Then Ewing had done the thing. She no more believed that Randall
Teevan still lived than she believed that the mountains about her were
phantoms. A sentence from the letter ran in her mind. "We must take life
as it falls--do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the
hardest thing."

"The hardest thing!"

She pleaded fatigue and lack of appetite to Virginia and sought her bed
to lie and think in the dark. She saw her own hardest thing, the thing
she must do.

She had caused a man to be put to death; a vicious, mischievous fool, it
was true, but still a man. That was sad and horrible. But of another
man, one she had thought to guard and cherish and care for in all of
woman's ways--she had made a murderer, and she had murdered him. For she
knew that Ewing must die. It was as if he were already dead. Perhaps out
there in the agonized void of the world he had already killed himself,
his work being done. Or, if not, they would kill him. She felt a blind,
hollow sickness, as if her heart had broken and was bleeding away inside
her. She had made her beloved a slayer and had slain him. She could not
live with it. She hungered for her own death with intolerable desire.

She arose with a despair-cleared mind the next morning, her resolve
made. Only the smaller details were to be worked out. She walked by the
lake, resolving these. Once she wept, from the very abundance and color
of life about her. Life was so full, and she had taken it from him in
his splendid youth. But she would not shirk the penalty of her
blood-guiltiness. She looked out to the hills beyond the valley that
fell away from the lake, studying headland and wooded slope and canyon
opening, choked with green. Some spot far out there would be secret and
gracious to her--welcome her with a finger on its lips--take her and
keep. Death, to her, was no longer terrible. There had been a long
intimacy with it. She rushed to the idea of it as to a home--a benignant
succor from the unendurable thought.

Back i