"Then you're Ben Gaynor's girl?"

"Yes," she said again, and was about to go on, resenting his persistent meddlesomeness.

"And you say he's well?"

"Quite well, I believe," she said coolly.

"But wait a minute," he called after her. "Wasn't he bad hurt last night?"

"Papa hurt?"

"I supposed that was why you was here——"

"How hurt?" she cried sharply. "When? Where? Tell me; why don't you tell me?"

He looked at her in wonder.

"All I know is just what I heard. And you know how news gets itself all twisted up travelling half a mile. I heard he got hurt at old Loony Honeycutt's last night. Right bad hurt, they said. But I was just asking you——"

"Where is he?" she cut in excitedly. "Now?"

"Didn't you just come out of the hotel?" He looked more puzzled than ever. "Wasn't he there?"

"How do I know? Was he taken there?"

He nodded. "Leastways I heard he was. Last night——"

Gloria did not wait for more. She turned and ran back to the building she had quitted only a moment ago, bursting into the front room, demanding earnestly and in words that came with a rush:

"Is my father here? Is he hurt?"

"Your father? Hurt——Say, you ain't Ben Gaynor's daughter, are you?"

"Yes, yes. And papa——"

"They had a doctor over from Placerville last night. He's coming back again this morning some time."

"Take me to papa. Quick!" said Gloria imperiously. "You should have told me the minute I came."

"But I didn't know——"

"Quick!" repeated Gloria.

He showed her to the room, only three doors beyond her own. He moved to open the door but Gloria's hand was first to the knob; she opened and went in, closing the door softly. She was trembling, frightened, dreading, oppressed by fear of what might be. Though both windows were open the shades were drawn, the light was dim. She made out a man's form on the bed; there was a white bandage about his head. He stirred and turned half over.

"Papa!" cried Gloria, her voice catching.

She ran to him and went down on her knees at his bedside, her two hands finding his upon the coverlet, clasping them tight. He looked at her in wonderment; Gloria misread the look in his eyes and for a terrible moment thought that he was dying.

"Gloria!" he said in amazement. "Here——"

"Oh, papa!"

To Ben Gaynor this unannounced coming of his daughter partook of the nature of an apparition and of a miracle. At first he would not believe his senses, fearing that he had just gone off his head. Then it was that the look in his eyes frightened her. But the hands gripping his were flesh-and-blood hands, and, besides, Ben Gaynor was a very matter-of-fact man, little given to prolonged fanciful ideas, even after a night of pain and mental distress.

"By the Lord, we'll nail their hides to our barn door yet!" were his first words of greeting. He hitched himself up against his pillows.

"What in the world happened?" Gloria asked after a sigh of relief.

"How you happened to be here gets me," said Gaynor. "It's like magic. You didn't hear down in San Francisco that I was hurt, did you?"

"No. I—I just happened to be here. You see, papa——"

"That'll come later," he broke in. "You're here; that's all that counts. You're going to do something for me."

Anything, thought Gloria. And she was glad that he did not seek just now the explanation of her presence here; of course she would tell him everything—later. But she was still confused—"Mrs. Gratton "! Did she, down in the depths of her frivolous girl-heart, want to be that? Had she glimpsed, when she so gaily left San Francisco last night, that this escapade was something more than a mere "lark"?

"You are not dangerously hurt, papa?"

"Bless you, no! Not now, that you're here. Though I believe it would have near killed me if I'd been put out of the running altogether. I got a crack on the head that sickened me; but the tough old skull held out against it. And I got an arm broken and a rib cracked——"

Gloria, aghast, was once more in fear for him. But he cried impatiently:

"Don't you worry about me. I'll be on my feet in a week. Now, listen: I've got to talk fast before somebody comes in. The doctor is apt to be here any minute, and he's a stiff-necked tyrant. You know the trail through the mountains to our place; you rode it twice with King."

"Yes."

"I want you to ride it again to-day. You can get a horse at the stable. Don't let any one know where you are going. I want you to take a message to King. And it's got to get to him and into nobody's hands but his. Understand that, Gloria?"

Gloria did not answer promptly; she wanted to demur. She was tired; she was afraid of the mountains; she did not want to see Mark King. But she saw a terrible earnestness in her father's eyes and that while he awaited her answer quick fever spots glowed in his cheeks. She squeezed his hands and replied:

"Of course, papa. I'll do whatever you want."

"God bless you for that," he muttered. "This is sober, serious business, Gloria; you are the only one here I could trust. King will be at the house; at least I hope he will. I sent him word several days ago that—that something was in the wind, and to meet me there. And, Gloria, I want you to promise, by all that's good and holy, that you won't let a word or a sign or a hint slip to anybody else. Not to a soul on earth. Will you, Gloria?"

"Yes." She looked at him curiously; she had never known her father to be so tensely in earnest.

"Then," he said, "go turn the key in the lock. And hurry. Before any one comes."

She locked the door and returned to him.

"Feel under my pillow. Got it?"

She felt the cold barrel of a revolver and started back; never had she known her father to carry arms. Then, gingerly, she sought again. She found a small parcel and drew it out. It was a flattish affair and rectangular, the size and shape of an octavo volume—a flat box, if not a book. It was wrapped in a bit of soiled cloth.

"Quick," he commanded nervously. "Out of sight with it. Stick it into your blouse, if you can; tuck it away under your arm; it won't show so much there."

Catching something of his suppressed excitement, she obeyed.

"I managed a little note to Mark," he said when she had buttoned the loose shirt again and he had sunk back, white and exhausted, among his pillows. "I stuck it inside the cloth. Lord, if I was only on my feet! But you'll do it for me, my girl? With never a hint to any one?"

Gloria stooped and kissed him on the forehead.

"I promise, papa," she said assuringly.

"Unlock the door again, then. There's somebody coming. Sit down over there, across the room. And leave as soon as you can. We'll let them think you're going to the log house for—for——"

She was quicker at inventions.

"Doctor Rowell, our family physician, is at Lake Tahoe. I am going to find him. We would telephone, but he is camped out——"

"Pretty late for camping. Oh, that'll do——"

Gloria sat in her chair across the room, looking innocently the part of a daughter in a sick-room, when the door opened and the Placerville doctor came in. A moment later she slipped out.

* * * * *

She went out into the sunshine. Down the road she saw Gratton. He came quickly to meet her. She saw that he was eyeing her keenly, and her thought was that he was wondering if by chance she had seen the hotel register.

"I don't know just what to do," said Gratton. "My business is going to hold me here longer than I had thought. I—I promised to go back with you this afternoon. Would it be all right if I got a man to drive you back? I am terribly sorry, Gloria, but——"

"Business is business!" She laughed a trifle nervously. Then her inspiration: "I know! I can go to our mountain home; I'll phone mamma, and she will come up. We'll spend a few days, and——"

For an instant his eyes fairly blazed; they were bright with triumph.

"Just the thing! I'll go for the horses. I'll ride over with you and get right back here."

"But——"

But already, excusing himself hurriedly, Gratton was off for the horses.



Chapter XII

It was mid-afternoon when Gloria and Gratton came to the log house in the woods. Jim Spalding, coming to take their horses away to the stable, though a man of no wild flights of imagination and given to minding his own business, was plainly curious.

"We rode on ahead, Jim," Gloria told him, and Jim detected no false note in her gaiety. "Mamma is coming."

Spalding gave them a key and they went to the house. It was Gloria who unlocked the door; Gratton, his white face looking more than ever bloodless, saw her hand tremble. She hurried in, excused herself, and ran upstairs. She knew that the time had come when she would have to listen to what Gratton was going to say; she knew what the burden of his plea would be—she knew everything, she thought wildly, except what her answer would be.

She heard Gratton stirring restlessly downstairs. He walked up and down, snapping his fingers incessantly, a habit which in the man bespoke nervousness. He sat at the piano and the keys jangled under his touch; he got up and walked again. He was waiting for her to come down; he was shaping in mind the words which would greet her before she had come fairly to the bottom of the stairs.

Gloria turned into her own room, locking the door behind her. She looked at herself in her glass; she was pale, her eyes looked unnaturally big and brilliant. She bit her lips and turned away. From her blouse she brought out the parcel her father had entrusted to her, slipping it under her mattress, smoothing the counterpane when she had done. Then, with but one clear thought in the world, that of getting into immediate touch with her mother, she went to the telephone.

On this floor, in a cosy little room opening upon the upstairs sun-porch, was an extension telephone, installed for the convenience of Gloria and her mother. Gloria went tiptoeing to it rather than go down where Gratton was. She rang the necessary bell for the operator in Truckee and put in her long-distance call in low tones which demanded a repetition before the operator got it right. Then she sat with the instrument in her hand, waiting. Once she heard Gratton's step close to the stairs and jumped to her feet, thinking that he was coming up. But he passed by and the house grew silent again.

She wondered when Mark King would come! This afternoon—to-night—to-morrow? Spalding had said nothing; she had not mentioned King to Spalding, since she had not mentioned him to Gratton during the long ride——

Her telephone bell rang. After the irritating way of telephones, she was put presently into communication with Mrs. Gaynor.

"Gloria! Gloria! Is that you?" Her mother's voice sounded strange in Gloria's ears—shaken with emotion.

"Yes, mamma. I——"

"What has happened, child? Tell me, quick! I am nearly dead with worry. Are you all right?"

"Of course, mamma. I——"

"But where are you? Where were you all night? Are you sure everything is all right?"

Never had Gloria known her extremely clear-headed mother to be so wildly disturbed, so nervously incoherent.

"I have told you I am all right. I am up in the mountains, at our log house. Didn't Mr. Gratton tell you——?"

"Mr. Gratton?" Mrs. Gaynor was only more mystified. "He has told me nothing; I haven't seen him. I tried to phone him—oh, I have phoned everybody we know!—and he is out of town, and——"

But Gloria, panic-stricken by something her mother had said, cried:

"You have phoned everybody! Oh, mamma! What—what do you mean?"

"When you didn't come in last night—I have been crazy with worry! I thought you might be spending the night with one of your friends; I thought that maybe something had happened and it was being kept from me. I rang up Georgia Stark and Mildred Carter and the Farrilees—and even the emergency hospitals. I thought——"

The rest was only a meaningless buzzing in Gloria's ears; she sat speechless herself, bereft of all reason for a dull moment, then harbouring quick, clear thoughts, as swift, as vivid as lightning, and in the end as blinding by their very quality of blazing light. The newspapers!

Still, dominated subconsciously by the thought which had brought her to the telephone, Gloria managed before the connection was broken to beg her mother to come immediately to her at the log house; to tell every one that Gloria was with her father. Her mother promised; began asking questions, and Gloria said a bleak "good-bye" and hung up.

The newspapers. She sat there staring into space and seeing the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, hawked by newsboys, on stands, thrust under doors, going like spreading snowflakes of a big storm into post-offices, to racing trains, all over the land. Her mother had telephoned the emergency hospitals! Gloria could have wept in rage, screamed, thrown herself down and given over to paroxysms of weeping. But she only sat on, her face whiter and whiter, looking into emptiness and seeing headlines that towered as high as immense black cliffs. Her mother had telephoned Mildred Carter, that hateful, hateful, thrice-hateful Mildred Carter; had confessed that Gloria had gone out with Mr. Gratton; was gone all night, no one knew where; Mildred Carter who was as good as married to Bob Dwight of the Chronicle! And the emergency hospitals—Gloria with never a tear coming in her hour of greatest distress sat rocking back and forth on her chair, crying: "Oh, I wish I were dead!"

As one hears noises through a dream, long powerless to connect them logically with familiar happenings, so now did Gloria absently hearken to Gratton calling from the foot of the stairs. She jumped up only when she heard him start to mount them. Then, galvanized, she sprang to her feet, cried to him, "I'll be down in just a second," and ran to her room. She stood again looking at herself in her glass.

"Gloria Gaynor," she heard her own pale lips say, "you have gotten yourself into a nasty, nasty mess." The lips began to tremble; then, with a great struggle for will-power, they steadied. "And," said Gloria in a cold, harsh little voice, "it's up to you, and no one else, to get out the best you can this time."

She bathed her face and hands; she rubbed her cheeks with a towel, determined to bring some vestige of colour back; she took down her hair. Only then, so distrait to-day was Gloria, did she think of changing from her boyish suit into a house dress. Her eyes, which had harboured only bewilderment and terror, now grew speculative. She brought from her closet half a dozen dresses; chose a certain pink one without analysing the reasons of her selection, found silk stockings and pumps, and dressed from top to toe. She would have to have it out with Gratton, one way or the other—she began to know which way it would be. But always a girl should be at her best. Also, she decided, by the time that she was becomingly gowned and her hair arranged tastefully, it was as well to let Gratton wait for her a while; waiting always, to some extent, brought to the one cooling his heels a sense of disadvantage. In short, Gloria had gone through the most panicky of her moments and was getting a grip on herself again. When, after Gratton had waited and fumed for upward of an hour, she went downstairs she looked cool and pretty, and quite unembarrassed. He flashed a look at her that was eloquent of nervous excitement.

"I want to explain everything to you, Gloria——"

"It will take a good deal of explaining, won't it, Mr. Gratton?"

They went into the living-room and Gloria sat in a big chair while he stood before her, his fingers tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.

"You listened-in while I talked with mamma, didn't you?" she said carelessly.

"No!" said Gratton, but so promptly that she knew he lied.

"Well?" she said indifferently. "Suppose we have the explanations now? I am sure that they will prove interesting."

"I am afraid," he began, talking swiftly, "that I have been instrumental in placing you in a false position. Last night I told you I had telephoned to your mother. I did try; they reported the line out of order. What could I do? I didn't want to alarm you. It was only a lark; I meant innocently, you know that, don't you, Gloria?"

"Did you?" she said, and managed to keep her lips smiling.

"It is only since coming here that I have realized how things will look; what people will think—and say, curse them. Our being out so long together; my buying clothing for you——"

"Our being registered as Mr. and Mrs. Gratton——"

His eyes burned, his lips clamped tight.

"Forgive me, Gloria! It was the mad impulse of a moment. I thought as we went in that it would look strange—a young, unmarried couple; that if I put down man and wife no one would think anything at all. And we'd be gone in a few hours; and probably you'd never go back there; and no one would know who you were."

"I see." Gloria's tone, devoid of expression, gave no clue to her racing thoughts. "You did that for my sake!"

"Yes," he said eagerly. "As I would do anything on earth for your sake. You know that, Gloria; you know, and have known for a long time—always—that I love you. I was going to ask you soon to—to marry me, Gloria. And now, now you will marry me, won't you?"

"Yes." But Gloria did not say it aloud; not yet. She merely made it perfectly clear to Miss Gloria Gaynor that she was going to marry Gratton, and that there was to be no further question of it. And, oh, God! at this fateful moment, how she hated him! How she loathed and detested him! While a week ago—yesterday—she had wondered, dreamily, if she were in love with him! But that was when he was in the city, at home in his own wilderness. But now! She was in a trap. This man had made it, cunningly using in his work all that he knew of Gloria Gaynor. There was no way out, save through the gate of matrimony. And—in her heart she laughed at him—through that other wider gate beyond, the gate of divorce. She would accept his name; the name of Gratton stood high in San Francisco. Then she would tell him how she loathed him; she would laugh at him, for physically she had no fear of him. And he would never have her for his own, despite all of his money and his position and his hideous trickery. Gratton, with all of his shrewdness, had not taken into consideration one thing: how in the city, on his native heath, he attracted Gloria; how in the woods he impressed her, in his unbecoming outdoor togs, as contemptible.

"You know how I love you," he was repeating. And he was sincere; she saw that in his eyes, in the unaccustomed colour in his face. He loved her as such an unclean animal could love. Oh, how he sickened her! "Will you marry me, Gloria? Will you forgive me for having, however unintentionally, placed you in a wrong light? Will you give me the right to protect you, to defend your good name? Oh, Gloria——"

Strange that the man had never revolted her as he did now! She wanted to get up and run from him. Meantime she was telling herself, almost calmly: "Yes, you'll marry him. The little beast!" She did get to her feet; he followed her into the hall.

"Let me be alone for a little while," she said quietly. She went to the stairway. "I am going upstairs; wait here for me——"

"You will come to me? You will marry me?"

"I—think—so. Don't!" she cried sharply as he moved to come to her. "Wait——"

He swallowed nervously. "I—I hoped you would. And I saw how terribly the events of the last few hours might be misconstrued. So, Gloria, daring to hope, I sent word for a justice of the peace. He will be here this afternoon or this evening——"

"Justice of the peace!" Gloria's nerves jangled loose in her irrepressible laughter.

"We'll have a priest later, of course," he ran on hurriedly. "But I couldn't arrange for one so soon."

Gloria went slowly upstairs, walking backward, looking down on him with unfathomable eyes.

"Tell me, Gloria. I'll promise not to come near you until you say I may. Is it yes?"

"Yes," said Gloria, and was gone in a flash, turning, running up and out of sight.

He stood looking after her, tapping and tapping at his cigarette-case.



Chapter XIII

To Gloria the sluggish moments were fraught with despondency or pulsating terror. All arrangements were made; she was powerless, in a trap; a justice was coming; she was going to marry Gratton. She lay on her bed with her door bolted and wept bitterly, moaning over and over: "Oh, I wish I were dead!" She heard Gratton stirring restlessly downstairs. She herself grew restless; she sprang up, tiptoed to her door, and slipped out as silent as a shadow. She went into the little room where the telephone was and through it to the sun-porch. For a long time she stood looking out across the mountains, her hand pressed to lips which trembled. She thought of her mother who, coming as fast as she could, no doubt by automobile, since she would not have the patience for trains, would not arrive before to-morrow morning. A night here—alone, worse than alone——

But great as was the emotional tension, lusty and now wearied youth must be served. She had danced and ridden all through the night; she had not had over an hour or so of broken sleep; she had been going all day. She dropped to sleep on the swing-couch on the porch. It was so very silent all about her; the shadows were creeping, creeping among the pines.

She awoke with a start. It was quite dark; the first stars burned with steadily growing brilliancy. Some one was standing above her, looking down at her. She could see only the vague outline——

"Gloria——"

A little cry of fear broke from her.

"Gloria," pleaded Gratton. "Don't you know I wouldn't——?"

"I'll be down in a minute," she told him, drawing as far away as she could, speaking with nervous haste. "Go down, please. Wait for me."

"The justice is downstairs," he said, his own voice agitated despite his effort for mastery. "Are you ready?"

"Yes, yes! In a minute I'll be down. Go. Please go."

He hesitated; she could have screamed at him. But presently he began withdrawing. Slowly, hideously slowly——

"When you are ready. And—he has a long ride back, Gloria. We should not keep him waiting."

She watched until he had gone. Then she crouched, staring with wide, unseeing eyes into the outside dark. The man would go right away; she would not have even him to mitigate the horrible condition of aloneness with Gratton.

"I won't marry him!" she cried out. "I won't. I hate him. He is a beast, and—I won't!"

There was, after all, nothing to force her. Nothing—save that she had been away all this time with Gratton, that he had bought clothing for her, that he had registered himself and wife. And the newspapers! She heard a door slam and sprang up; if the justice went away now without marrying them! She would marry him; why, if he had been of a notion to demur she would have made him marry her!

"I can't think clearly. I wonder if I am insane?" She went with heavy, leaden steps back to her room. A pale, weary face looked at her from her glass. She began arranging her hair. Her fingers, with wills of their own, refused to obey her own command laid upon them. She sought wildly to delay, delay to the last fragment of the last second before yielding to the inevitable; she wanted to loiter over her hair, and her fingers raced. She could hear voices downstairs. Gratton's voice, low and urgent; a thin, querulous voice; she shuddered. That would be the justice. Another voice, a man's and strange to her. He said nothing, but twice she heard him laugh, a laugh that jarred upon her nerves. She guessed who he would be; the man Gratton had sent to bring the justice.

"Gloria!" Gratton was calling from the foot of the steps.

The voice that answered for her was clear and steady and, downstairs, must have sounded untroubled:

"I'm coming. Just a minute."

* * * * *

Two hours ago, while Gloria had been watching the shadows creeping among the pines, Mark King had arrived. He had come down the ridge from the rear and thus to the outbuilding by the stable which housed the caretaker, old Jim Spalding.

"Hello, Mark," Jim had said, a trifle startled by King's sudden appearance. "Here you come again, like a Injun out'n the woods."

Jim was smoking his pipe on his bench. King paused, saying:

"Hello, Jim. Has Ben showed up yet?"

"No, he ain't showed, Mark. Expectin' him?"

"Yes. Who's in the house, then?"

"Why, some of 'em come on ahead. Ben's girl, for one, and that city guy, Gratton, for another. She didn't say anything about Ben comin'; she did say, though, the missis would be along pretty soon."

Gloria and Gratton here? King frowned. He had had ample time during the long weeks since the twelfth of August to decide that he had nothing to say to Gloria Gaynor. And now she was here—with Gratton. He turned into Jim's quarters. He had no desire—or at least so he told himself very emphatically—to see either one of them.

"I've hit the trail hard to-day, Jim," he said as Jim followed him and King closed the door. "And I'm dead tired and as hungry as a bear. What shape's the cupboard in?"

"Fine," returned Spalding hospitably. "You know me, Mark."

So it happened that while Gloria fought her losing battle all alone, Mark King sat at Spalding's table, not a hundred yards away, and made a silent meal of coffee and bread of Jim's crude baking, and a dubious, warmed-over stew. Thereafter King threw himself down on Jim's bunk and the two smoked their pipes. With nothing in particular to be said, virtually nothing was said.

"Needn't tell anybody I'm here, Jim." King was knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "I haven't any business with the folks in there. But keep your eye peeled for Ben, will you? The minute he comes I want to see him."

"Maybe," suggested Spalding, "his girl brought word?"

"No. Ben is in Coloma. Gratton and Miss Gaynor and Mrs. Gaynor would have come up from the city, you know. That means they would have come through Placerville or Truckee."

"Guess so," agreed Spalding. "That's right. I'll set outside where I can watch for Ben. Goin' to take a snooze?"

"Yes."

And after lying ten minutes staring up at the ceiling above him King went to sleep.

"Must of been goin' some to-day," meditated the man who was once more on his bench outside the door. "King looks tuckered."

He sat through the thickening shadows watching the stars come trooping into the darkening sky, hearkening to the night breeze among the trees, and the thin singing noises of insects. An hour or so later he heard horses. "That would be Ben, now," was his first thought. His second was that it might be some one else, and that there was no sense waking a tired man for nothing. So he went down toward the house. He saw two men dismount and tie their horses; he saw the door open and Gratton come out. The horsemen went up to the porch. Neither was Ben Gaynor. One, as he passed in through the light-filled doorway, was a little grey man whom Jim had never seen before; the other man, it happened, he knew. Rather well by sight and reputation, a good-for-nothin' scalawag, as Jim catalogued him, name of Steve Jarrold. The door closed after them and Jim went back to his bench.

* * * * *

In the house they were waiting for Gloria. The little grey man whom they called "judge," and who had a way of clearing his throat before and after the most trifling remark, went up and down with his hands under his coat-tails, peering near-sightedly at pictures and books and wall-paper.

"Quite a tidy little place Ben Gaynor's got here," he said patronizingly. "Quite a tidy little place."

Gratton paced back and forth, whirling always abreast of the stairs, looking up expectantly. Steve Jarrold, the man whom Gloria had heard laugh, never budged from the spot where he had landed when entering the living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less lustrously black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he was being paid for.

At last, since no delay holds back for ever the rolling of the great wheels of time, Gloria came. Slowly she descended the stairs, one hand at her breast, one gripping the banister. Her pallor was so great that her lips, though pale also, looked unnaturally red in contrast. They were just a little apart; she seemed to breathe with difficulty. Her eyes, glancing wildly about the room and at the men to be seen in the hallway, were the eyes of one in a trap, seeking frantically for escape, knowing that there was no escape. Her brain, like one's in a fever, was quick to impressions, alive with broken fragments of thought like so many flashes of vari-coloured light. She noted trifles; she saw a painting over Gratton's head—a seascape her father had given her for her fourteenth birthday. She saw three pairs of eyes staring at her, men's eyes, to her the eyes of wild animals; she read as clearly as if their messages had been in large, printed letters what lay in the mind of each: in the little grey man's, the judge's, speculation; in Steve Jarrold's, the jeers of a man of Jarrold's type at such a moment when they fall upon the bride; in Gratton's, quickened desire of her and triumphant cunning.

"My dear," said Gratton, coming forward as though to meet her and then pausing abruptly and holding back, "this is Judge—Judge Summerling. He will—perform the ceremony, you know. And this is Mr. Jarrold. He brought the judge and will be a witness."

Gloria from the last step regarded the three men as a prisoner might have looked upon jailers coming to drag her to execution. Her lips moved but no sound issued. "Judge" Summerling bowed stiffly and cleared his throat. Steve Jarrold's hat ceased revolving an instant, then fairly spun as though to make up for lost time.

Suddenly Gloria began to laugh hysterically, uncontrollably. Gratton whipped back and stared at her; Summerling and Jarrold were mystified. She looked so little like laughter! And, as both had cause to regard the situation, there was so little call for laughter. But they could have no clue to Gloria's thoughts. Her wedding! With that insignificant little grey man in his cheap wrinkled clothes to officiate; with that unshaven, leering, dirty man to witness! Holy matrimony! Gloria Gaynor's wedding! She was near madness with the hideous, cruel travesty of such weddings as are dear to the hearts of San Francisco "society" girls.

The "judge" was clearing his throat again. She looked at him curiously, with the odd sensation that while Gloria Gaynor was asleep, drugged into a deep stupor, there was within her another Gloria who took a keen interest in the smallest happenings.

"This affair ain't any more regular than it ought to be," he was saying. "Now, just the matter of the licence——"

Gratton jerked about and glared at him. The "judge" broke off with a vehement clearing of his throat. In a moment he spoke again.

"Seein' as both parties want to get married," he said hastily, "and as circumstances is what they is—keepin' in mind how circumstances does alter cases—well then—are you ready?"

That "Are you ready?" seemed to explode like a pistol shot in Gloria's ears. Something within her shrieked: "No, no, no!" Gratton had said a quiet "Yes," and was looking at her. She heard herself saying faintly: "Yes."

Gratton put out his hand as though to help her down the last step. She made a little gesture, motioning him back. He bit at his lip and obeyed, though with a quick flash of the eyes. Gloria looked down at the step. About six inches high, and yet—and yet where she stood was as high as heaven, down there as deep as hell. She seemed powerless to achieve that last step. But Gratton was stirring restlessly; he would put out his hand again to help her. She shuddered and moved quickly. Now she stood on the same level as Gratton and the others; the physical fact was sinister as though symbolical of the psychical.

The "judge" began to grow vastly businesslike. He must have the full names correctly, ages, birthplaces. Gratton answered for himself and for Gloria, who stood now with her hand on the back of a chair just within the living-room door. Across the room was the fireplace; over it an ornamental mirror. She wondered dully what she looked like; the "bride"! But from where she stood she could see only the reflection of the window across the room, the strip of curtain at the side stirring softly in the evening breeze. That breeze came down through the pines; it wandered free; why couldn't she, Gloria, be like that? She thought poignantly of her few days among the pines with Mark King. Oh, the remembered glory of it, the clean, sweet freedom of it.

"Now, folks, if you're ready. Stand side by side—"

"Oh!" cried Gloria.

"Eh? What's that?" demanded the "judge."

She tried to smile.

"I—I think——" She saw Steve Jarrold leering. "The witness," she said wildly. "There is only one, and——"

"It's usual to have two, anyhow," admitted the "judge." "But, being as things is a bit irregular and everything, why we'll make one do."

"There's Jim," said Gloria. She did not look toward Gratton, but he understood that she addressed him. "Jim Spalding. I'd feel better if some one I knew—if you'd get Jim to come, please."

She knew that she did not care whether Jim Spalding came or did not come; that she was fighting for delay and could not help snatching at any straw, though she knew that in the end she would go down, overwhelmed by circumstance. Circumstance and—Gratton. Gratton also knew and frowned.

"Gloria," he said smoothly, "that isn't necessary, is it?"

"Yes, it is!" she flared out at him hotly. "Go, get him."

"It will take only a minute," Gratton said over his shoulder as he went. He would see to it that it took no great amount of time. Spalding on his bench saw Gratton running toward him.

"You're wanted in the house a minute, Spalding," he said curtly. "Step lively, will you?"

Spalding, not given to stepping lively at other men's commands, was slow in answering, and then spoke drawlingly:

"Wanted, am I? Well, that's interestin'. By who? I'm wonderin'."

"Miss Gloria. She wants you right away."

"That's different," said old Jim, getting to his feet.

Gratton turned and hastened back to the house, Jim quickening his own pace as he sensed something out of the ordinary. The house door stood open as Gratton had left it, and the two entered hastily. Jim looked from face to face with keen, shrewd eyes, ignored Jarrold, who said a mirthful "Evenin', Jim," and turned to Gloria for explanation.

"Miss Gloria wanted——" began Gratton. But Jim Spalding lifted a big hand as though to ward off the words.

"I'm here, miss," he said when Gloria's white face only stared at him." You ain't sick, are you?"

"No, Jim, I—I am going to be married, and——"

"Married!" Jim looked incredulous and then puzzled as again his eyes went swiftly from one to the other of the three men's faces.

"Yes, Jim. And I want you to be a witness."

Jim flushed up and shifted uneasily. He had never been at a wedding; he did not know what a "witness" had to do. And to witness the wedding of Miss Gloria, who had never appeared to come down to earth long enough to know that there was such a man as Jim Spalding on the same sphere with her——He managed an uneasy "Yes'm," and backed off toward the door.

"Now, if you folks is ready," began the "judge" again.

"Right now?" muttered Jim. "You're gettin' married right now?"

"Yes," said Gloria wearily. And to Summerling: "I am ready."

"But I ain't!" cried Spalding. He got to the door and started down the hall. "Wait a minute, will you?"

Gratton hurried after him, his face hot with rage, while Steve Jarrold guffawed loudly and then, under Gloria's startled look, dropped his eyes.

"Come back here, Spalding," commanded Gratton angrily. "Whatever you've got to do can wait a minute——"

"You wait," growled Jim. "I'll be back quick enough."

* * * * *

Mark King was awakened by old Jim rushing into the room, lighting a lamp hastily, and making a deal of clatter. He sat up, demanding:

"Has Ben come?"

Jim began chuckling. After all, a wedding was a wedding, and therefore a matter well worth a man's allowing himself to get a bit excited. From a cupboard he began dragging forth his one and only serviceable suit of clothes, dingy black, shiny affairs, but Jim's "best." He kicked off his breeches, drew on the black trousers, and caught up the coat.

"No, Ben ain't back," he grinned at King. "Guess he'll be surprised when he does come. His girl's gettin' herself married. To that city guy, Gratton. Right now in the house!"

"What!" King had heard well enough, but that "What!" broke from him explosively.

"An' me, I'm a witness," said old Jim. "Steve Jarrold's another. They got the preacher there an' everything." He paused a moment and reflected, with puckered brows. "What do you think of her marryin' that swab, now? Think Ben's goin' to be pleased? Kind of surprising ain't it, Mark?"

King managed a laugh which escaped critical notice only because old Jim was only half listening.

"Oh, it's been open and shut all along that she'd marry Gratton," he said, keeping his head down as he drew a match across the floor as though to like a pipe whose bowl was empty. "If it suits his womenfolk, I guess Ben will stand for it."

By now Jim had drawn his coat on and was back at the door.

"Better come along, Mark," he invited. "You don't see a weddin' every day. Comin'?"

"No, thanks," said King. He broke his match between nervous fingers. He raised his head to watch Jim go.

"Lord, Mark," said Spalding, holding on his heel a moment. "You must of made one all-mighty day of it! You sure do look tuckered!"

King rose and went to the door and stood looking after the swiftly departing figure. He saw the house, the windows bright with lights, light streaming out through the door to the porch. There was Gloria. Just there. And he had slept, and Gloria was marrying. And here was the end of it—the end of everything, it dawned on him. He, who had never looked twice on a woman, had looked thrice on her and again. He, the one-woman man, had found the one woman—and had lost her. He looked out toward the house and through its thick log walls saw Gloria; Gloria as she had come down the stairs to him that first day, floating down like a pink thistledown, putting her two hands into his, looking up into his eyes with eyes which he would never forget; he saw her in the woods, riding with him; by the spring waiting eagerly for the little water-ouzel, she so like a bird herself; crossing a stream on boulders—she had slipped; he had caught her into his arms—close. Her hair had blown across his face. He stood with her on the highest crest of a ridge; the world lay below them, they were alone in the blue heavens. And he loved her. He groaned and ran his hand across his eyes as though to wipe the pictures out—pictures which would never pass away.

Gloria was marrying. Gratton. Now. He looked up into the sky bright with stars; its great message to him was "Emptiness." The world was empty, life was empty. There was nothing. Simply because Gloria had come, had laughed into his eyes, and had gone on. She was like the springtime which came dancing into the mountains which softened them and brightened them—and laughed and passed on and away. She would be laughing now—into Gratton's eyes.

He would never see her again after to-night. Other men had loved and their loves had crumbled to ashes, blown away by the winds of time. But to-night he would see her. The last time. While still she was Gloria Gaynor and not Gratton's wife——

He started and hurried toward the house. They were waiting for Jim and Jim had hurried. He came to the porch and, with never a board to creak under his careful tread, he made his way silently around to the living-room side of the house. There was a window there; the shade was not drawn; the curtains were blowing back and forth. He drew close and stood, watching. He would look at Gloria one last time, turning away just before the preacher said the last words; it was like looking for the last time on a beloved face before the sod fell——

He saw her. Her back was turned to him; her head was down. He watched her fingers moving nervously at her sides and his brow contracted with a sudden access of pain. Those fingers had touched his and he had thrilled to the soft, warm contact; he loved them better than he loved life. And soon they would find their way into Gratton's.

Not once did he move his eyes from her. She did not turn toward him, but as the "judge" began talking she lifted her head and King saw her throat, her cheek. How pale she was——

Though her head was up, her slim body drooped. Like a little wildwood flower wilting. So she remained for what seemed a very long time. Then suddenly he saw her body stiffen; her hands flew to her breast. The "judge," hurrying along, had asked:

"And do you take this man to be your wedded husband?"

King did not want to hear the answer; he turned to go. But hear now he must, for though until now responses had been low-voiced, hardly above a murmur, he heard Gloria crying:

"No! No and no and no!"

King stopped like a man paralysed. Had he gone mad? Then his pulses leaped and hammered. Gloria had cried "No!" A tremor shook him; he could no longer see her, but he stood where he was, his senses keyed to hear a falling pin within.

"He is a beast and I hate him!" cried Gloria wildly. "He tried to trick me and trap me. He tried to make me marry him But I won't! I won't! I'd rather die."

Her voice died chokingly away, and for five seconds it was deathly still. Still King did not move. He heard Gratton's exclamation, Gratton's hurried step. The man was excited, was expostulating. Other voices; the other men had drawn aside, amazed, leaving Gratton a clear field with his unwilling bride.

"Have you gone mad, Gloria?" King could hear the words now. "Think what you are saying——"

"I have thought. I hate you. Go away. Let me go."

Gratton's pale eyes must be ablaze with wrath now; his tone told that.

"There's no way out for you. You've got to marry me. I——"

"Take your hand off——"

Her voice broke into a scream.

"You're hurting me——"

And now Mark King moved at last. Before the last word had done vibrating through the still room he was through the window, taking the shortest way. Gratton's hand was on Gloria's shoulder; King threw it off, hurling the man backward across the room. Gloria turned to him——

"Mark!" she cried. "Oh, Mark King!"

He put his arms about her, thinking that she was going to fall. For an instant he held her tight; he felt her heart beating as though it would burst through her bosom.

"You won't let him——?"

He moved with her to a chair, placed her in it, and turned toward Gratton, a look like a naked knife in his eyes.

"By jings!" muttered old Jim under his breath. "By jings!"



Chapter XIV

At this, the most critical moment of her life, it would appear inevitable that Gloria must bend every mental faculty to grappling with the vital issues. And yet, as she sat swallowed up in the big chair, for a space of time she was in a spell, caught up and whirled away from those about her; she forgot Gratton with the white, angry face; she had no eyes for Mark King or for Summerling, Steve Jarrold or Jim Spalding. She was thinking of another day, two years ago, when she and her mother had been alone in this room. They had been busied with the last touches of furniture arrangement; they had discussed locations for chairs and had argued over pictures. Both tired out with a day of effort, they had come near tears in a verbal battle over the best place for the sole article remaining unplaced. Gloria wanted it in the hallway; Mrs. Gaynor pleaded for it over the mantel in the living-room. Finally it was Gloria who cried with sudden laughter:

"Oh, what difference does it make? We're getting silly over trifles. Have it your way, mamma."

Trifles! Gloria wondered if any other act of her life had had the tremendous import of that sudden yielding to her mother's wishes. If the mirror had been placed anywhere else in the universe, even by a few inches removed from its present abiding-place, would there be a Gloria Gaynor in all the world right now? Or would her chair hold quite another sort of person—Mrs. Gratton? If she had not lifted her desperate eyes and seen Mark King reflected at the window, how would she have answered that one final question the "judge" propounded? Would she have said "Yes"? Or would it have been "No"? She did not know; she would never know. She had been on the verge, dizzy with profitless speculation. And now, only the extent of one little word stood between her and an unthinkable condition. That a whole life should be steered down one channel or another—oh, what immeasurably separated channels!—by one's breath in a single-syllabled word——

* * * * *

"You don't answer!" a voice was saying irritably.

She started. They were talking to her, they had been talking to her, and now she realized that she had heard voices across a great distance, and by no means as clear to her consciousness as the remembered voice of her mother two years ago arguing for a mirror over the fireplace. She turned her eyes on Gratton, since obviously it was he who insisted on an answer. But King spoke for her.

"Look here, Gratton," he said bluntly, "as far as I can see there is no reason why Miss Gaynor should pay the least attention to your effervescings if she doesn't care to. She is a free agent and under no obligations to you."

"I'll ask your opinion when I want it," snapped Gratton. "Miss Gloria——"

"You asked me something?" said Gloria. "Pardon me. I didn't hear."

Her aloof reply disconcerted him. Her attitude was spontaneous, unaffected, and hence unconsciously one of polite indifference. Suddenly Gratton, fume as he would, had become of not the least importance.

"You said that you would marry me. Not a dozen minutes ago."

"Did I?" she demanded coolly. "Are you quite sure I said that?"

"Look here, Miss Gloria." It was Jim Spalding, who had been ill at ease all along and now had the brains and perhaps the delicacy to understand that this was no place for him. "If you don't need me after all, I'll go."

"And the rest of us with you," said King. "If Miss Gaynor cares to talk things over with Gratton——"

Gloria put out her hand impulsively, touching King's arm.

"You stay. Please. Until—he goes."

King inclined his head gravely, not realizing that his body stiffened under her light touch.

"What about me?" demanded the "judge" sharply. "Am I needed or ain't I?"

"I'd say not this evening," King's dry voice answered him. "Good-night to you."

"That's a fine way to treat a man," cried Summerling truculently. "Here I ride all this way in the dark, and without stoppin' for so much as supper; here I ain't had a bite to eat since dinner-time, and it's good-night and get out! And that hundred dollars I was to get so fast, how about that? Think I'm the man to let folks trample on me and——"

"Maybe Jim will give you a hand-out at his cabin," King told him. "As for your money, get it out of Gratton if he promised it to you—or," he added with a flash of heat, "take it out of his hide, for all I care."

"Wait for me outside, Summerling," muttered Gratton. "I haven't said you won't be needed, have I?"

"Just the same, I wouldn't mind takin' what's comin' to me now——"

"Man alive!" shouted Gratton, whirling on him. "Haven't I got enough on my hands without you yelping at me?"

"Just the same——"

"Jim," called King above the incoherent mouthings, "slip your arm through Summerling's and lead him off with you. Feed him if you feel like it, and let him stick around for a word with Gratton if he wants. And you, Steve Jarrold, Ben Gaynor isn't here, but just the same you can take it from me that neither you nor any other of Swen Brodie's hangdogs is wanted in Ben Gaynor's house. Out you go."

Jarrold's eyes slanted off to Gratton. Then, seeing himself ignored and forgotten, he shrugged his shoulders, pulled on his hat, and went out. Behind him, arm in arm, one smiling widely and the other pulling back and still sputtering, went Jim and the "judge."

To all this Gloria had given scant attention. The spell no longer lay over her; she was keenly awake to the demands of the present; she was thinking, thinking, thinking! It seemed that she had walked on quicksands; that a hand had drawn her up and placed her where she was now, with solid ground underfoot; but that still all about her were quicksands. What temporary sense of security was hers was due to Mark King, to his presence. As long as he stood there, where she could put out a hand and touch him, she could rest calmly, assured of safety. But when he went, there remained Gratton and his venom. Quicksands all about her in which she would be floundering at this moment but for Mark King——

* * * * *

Her heart was beating normally again, the pallor left her face, which became delicately flushed. Her eyes, large and humid, a sweet grey and once more almost childlike—eyes to remind a man that here, after all, was no woman of the world, but only a young girl—rose to King's and met his long and searchingly. Yet there was that in their expression that made him understand that she was not looking at him, the physical man, so much as through him. For the first time in her pampered life the day had come when she was face to face with vital issues; when there was no mamma and no papa to turn to; when there were no shoulders other than her own to feel the weight of events. She must do her own thinking, come to her own decisions. Here was no time for a misstep. The one great step she had already taken; she had cried "No!" That step could be reconsidered, retraced; she looked at Gratton's face and saw that. But now she would not do that; she could not. In the city, seeing the two men together, she had turned to Gratton. Now, here in her father's log house in the mountains, she wondered that she could have done so. Did men change colour like chameleons, shifted from one environment to another? Or was it she who had been unstable, she who was the chameleon? A queer sensation which had been hers before, and which she was to know more than once in days to follow, mastered her. It seemed that within her, coexistent and for ever in conflict, there were two Glorias: a girl who was very young, spoiled, vain, and selfish; a girl who was older, who looked above and beyond the confines of her own self, who was warmhearted and impulsive, and could be generous. There was the Gloria who was the product of her mother's teaching and pampering; there was that other Gloria who was the true daughter of a pioneer stock, a girl linked to the city through tradition, bound to the outdoors through instinct. There was the Gloria who was ashamed of Mark King at a formal gathering in her own home; there was the Gloria who was thrilled to the depths of her being as in the forest-lands she knew a breathless moment in the arms of Mark King.

Well, here were considerations to linger over on an idle day. Now, without seeking for hidden springs, there were on the surface certain plain facts. No matter what she had felt toward Gratton before, she detested him now; no matter what he might have appeared in San Francisco, here in his unaccustomed garb he looked to her puny, shallow, and contemptible. He was, as she had told him, a beast. He had betrayed her confidence; he had taken advantage of her headlong youth; he had displayed to her view the vileness within him. He loved her, did he? So much the better. It lay within her power, then, to repay him, if only in part, for what he had made her suffer.

* * * * *

"I repeat, Miss Gloria," Gratton was saying, a stubborn look in his eyes, "that you promised to marry me. You have had a hard day, I realize; there has been much to unnerve you. I erred in haste, perhaps; I should have waited until you had a night's rest. But you know why I did not wait. It was for your sake."

Gloria heard him through with a hard little smile.

"Nothing is further from my intention, Mr. Gratton," she told him icily, "than to marry you. Now or ever. Please let us consider the matter closed once and for all."

His fingers worked nervously at his sides. Gloria chose the moment to lift her eyes again fleetingly to King's. She wanted Gratton to see, she wanted to hurt him all that she could. She looked back to see him wince. Nor did his quick contraction of the brows result from her glance alone; he had seen the look lying unhidden in King's eyes. Mark King had to-night, for the first time, swept barriers aside and looked straight into his own heart and known that all of the love that was in him to give had been given to Gloria Gaynor; he had come from Jim's cabin to look on her for the last time; he was giving her up. And then, when he had turned away rather than hear her murmur "Yes," she had cried out ringingly: "No!" The sod had not fallen upon a beloved face; death had not entered the door; life was not extinguished—where there was life invariably there was hope—he had given Gloria up, yes; but she had come back from beyond the frontier, she had come calling to him. He was certain of nothing just now beyond the tremendous, all-excluding fact that, wise or fool, he loved her. He wanted her with a want that is greater than hunger or thirst, or love of man for man or of man for life itself. Much of this lay shining in his eyes for Gratton to read—or for Gloria.

"I am no boy to be thrown aside like an old glove," cried Gratton, beside himself, shaken with jealous fury. "You have promised; you have loved me; in your heart you love me now. Shall I stand back for a girl's nervous whim? I tell you, you shall marry me."

Gloria's laughter, cool and insolent, maddened him. He clenched his hands and was swept away by his passion to gusty vehemence:

"Think before you laugh! What if, instead of doing the gentlemanly thing, I refused to marry you? Alone with me all this time; all last night; a clerk to swear I bought clothing for you; a register to show where we engaged a room as man and wife; the San Francisco papers already bandying your name about, already nosing after scandal. You've got to marry me; there is nothing else for you to do!"

Gloria flushed hotly. But only in anger this time. King mystified, looking from one to the other, turned at last to Gloria and muttered:

"For God's sake let me throw him out of the door!"

"I think it might be best first," she answered quietly, "if Mr. Gratton remained long enough to understand that this is the last time I shall ever speak to him or listen to a word from him. He has tried to get me into a nasty situation; he will do all that he can to promote scandal. But I want him to know that he will, in the end of it all, have my father to reckon with—and my friends." Again she looked swiftly at King and again Gratton writhed at the look. "Papa will not be here to-night; he is hurt and in Coloma, and I'll give you his message soon. But——"

"You saw your father! In Coloma!" It was a gasp of astonishment from Gratton. "You said nothing. You brought a message to King here?"

"And you escorted me and never guessed!" Gloria taunted him. "Really it seems too bad, after all of your week-end trips to Coloma, after all of your conferences with the estimable Mr. Swen Brodie!"

His prominent eyes bulged, written large with consternation. For a moment he stood the picture of uncertainty, plucking at his lip.

"Gloria," he said shortly, "despite all you have said I shall see you again. To-morrow, when we have both rested, I'll come to you. Now, if you will pardon me, I'll have a word with King. Strictly business, you may be sure, King," he concluded sarcastically.

"There's to be no business between you and me," King told him promptly.

"But there is. If you've got two grains of common sense. Look you, Loony Honeycutt is dead at last. His secret is no longer his secret. Swen Brodie knows something—a whole lot——"

"It strikes me," frowned King, "that you know more of this than I gave you credit for. Where do you come in?"

"I know—nearly all that it is necessary to know!" His eyes flashed triumphantly. "Think I'm the man to let the crowd of you lift a fortune right under my nose? Here is my proposition, and you'll thank your stars that I make it: We are not friends, you and I, but that is no reason that we cannot be business associates until this trick is turned. You and I enter into a pact right now, purely business, you understand." He was speaking more and more rapidly in the grip of a new emotion. "Whatever we find we divide, fifty-fifty;——"

King's sudden laughter, no pleasant sound in Gratton's ears, checked the rush of words. To accept Gratton as a partner—on a fifty-fifty split of the spoils! Was the man crazy?

"I have been working with Brodie," shouted Gratton. "If I go on with him now, with him and the men with him, six or eight of them taking what he gives them either in money or in curses and orders—if, I say, I chip in with him against you, what will the inevitable end be, I ask you? Look at the odds——"

"The inevitable end," said King sternly, "will be that they'll pick your bones and kick you out."

"I demand to know what word Gaynor sent——"

"Will you have him go, Mark?" said Gloria. "He—sickens me."

King, unleashed by her words, took a quick step forward.

"Gratton," he said, "you'd better go."

Gratton, rising to fresh fury, shouted at him:

"And leave you and her here? Alone? All night——"

King bore down upon him and struck him across the mouth, hurling him back so that Gratton tripped and fell. Gloria rose and stood watching, terrified and yet fascinated. She saw Gratton crawl to his feet; his hand went out to the table to draw himself up; it found one of the heavy bronze book-ends; the fingers gripped it so that the tendons stood out like cords. She could see the faces of both men, Gratton's twitching and vindictive, King's immobile, looking at once calm and terribly stern. If there were two Glorias within her, one of them fled now; the other watched with quick bright eyes and gloried in the man who had come at her hour of direst need; one vanished, afraid, the other felt a little thrill go singing through her blood. And though that bronze block, were it hurled at King's head, might have been the death of him, she was not once in doubt as to the end of this conflict. There before her eyes a man contended with a manikin.

"Drop that, Gratton! Do you hear me? Drop it, I say!"

He even drew closer while he spoke. In his voice was assurance that he would be obeyed; in his look was the promise of death or near-death, to be meted out swiftly and relentlessly for disobedience. Gratton, like a man in a daze, hesitated. King's hand shot out swiftly, gripping his wrist. There was a sudden jerk and the bit of bronze crashed to the floor.

"You'll go now!"

"Yes, I'll go. But——"

"On your way, then!"

"But——"

"Shut up!" A tremor not to be repressed shook King's voice. "And go before I——Just go!"

Gratton caught up his hat, stood for a moment plucking at his lip and staring at Gloria, and then turned and went out. Strangely, only now that he had gone, did Gloria shiver and look after him fearfully. The man here had seemed so futile and yet she had seen that last look, so filled with malevolence that in his wake the room seemed steeped in menace. King must have had somewhat the same sort of an impression; he went to the door and called out loudly:

"Jim! Oh, Jim."

Jim's voice answered from the cabin:

"Comin', Mark."

"Gratton's outside. I've told him to clear out. Give him about two minutes, and if he's still here throw a gun on him and run him off the place."

"Oh, I'm going fast enough." From somewhere off in the dark it was Gratton's voice calling back hatefully. "And don't you forget it, Mark King, I am going where an offer like mine to you will be accepted. We'll be there before you yet, a dozen men that won't lay down before you! And you can tell that girl in there, with my compliments, she'll be on her knees to me before she's a day older." He lifted his voice so that Gloria, shivering in the silent house, must hear every word. "You can tell her, too, that if I didn't telephone to her mother from Oakland, I did call up two of the San Francisco newspaper offices! Tell her to watch for the papers. And when they get wind of the nice little situation to-night, Gloria here all night——"

King had held the door open only to see if Gratton was going to his horse. Now, however, he slammed it suddenly and went back to Gloria. After all, Jim could be depended on to see to Gratton and to do his job thoroughly and with joy in the doing. There was still the message to be had from Ben Gaynor, who, it seemed, lay hurt somewhere in Coloma.

But he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Gloria, and for the moment all thoughts of Gaynor or a message fled from his mind. Again she was as pale as death; she caught at the back of the chair which had served her thus before; she lifted to King eyes sick with terror.

"I haven't got the straight of things very well," King said to her, speaking very gently. For in his heart he was thinking: "Poor little kid! She's only a kid of a girl and she's pretty near the breaking-point, from the look of things, and small wonder." But aloud he continued: "Only one thing seems clear. You are tired half to death and worried the other half. I wouldn't let myself think of that snake Gratton or his poison drippings. Things will work out all right." He managed a smile of a sort, the first smile to-night, and added: "They always do, you know."

"Do they?" she asked listlessly. And she, too, forced a smile, so wan and bleak that it came close to putting a dash of tears into King's eyes.

"For one thing," he said brusquely, "I'll bet you haven't had a bite to eat since you got here; have you?" She shook her head; she hadn't thought of such a thing as eating. When had she eaten last? Not since she and Gratton, motoring up from San Francisco, had stopped at the wayside lunch-counter? Perhaps that was why this giddy faintness troubled her, why the blood drummed in her ears.

"You'll sit right down," commanded King. "Or lie down is better. In two shakes I'll have something ready for you."

"You are so good to me." That came straight from Gloria's heart; her eyes shone with a gratitude which struck him as far beyond proportion to the small deed of the moment. "I'll go upstairs a moment; papa's message——"

"It can wait ten minutes."

"Let me get it now. I—I will lie down in my room until you call me, if you want me to."

"That's good." He watched her go slowly upstairs and then hastened to the kitchen. He got a wood fire going in the range, scouted for coffee, found a glass jar of bacon, a tin of milk, all kinds of canned goods. And meantime, though occupied with much speculation concerning all that had happened to-night and must have happened before and might happen in the future, he never for an instant entirely forgot Gloria and how pitifully borne down she looked. Gratton had tricked her some way, had coerced her, had come close to breaking her utterly. And yet her indomitable spirit had in the end triumphed over Gratton's scheming; King would never forget how her voice had rung out in that fearless "No! No and no and no!"

"Just a little kid of a girl." And he had looked to her for the sanity of mature age. A mere girl, sheltered always by father and mother, spoiled to the nth degree, given no opportunity to develop her own character, to grow up to life's responsibilities. Her mother had not even told her of her grandparents, being ashamed of them, making Gloria ashamed. Grandparents of whom any one might be justly proud; folk of integrity, of stamina, of fearless hardihood, men and women of that glorious type that builds empires. And Gloria, King sensed, was like them. Deep within her, under the layers of artificiality which her mother had striven so indefatigably and lovingly to lay on, she was like them. He remembered his two days with her alone in the mountains and sought to forget the fragment of one evening in the city. "Here she was her real self; there she had been what her mother had made her over."

* * * * *

Gloria, with lagging steps, had gone to her room. Now she lay on her bed, her hands pressed tight upon her closed eyes, her will set against heeding the throbbing in her temples as she strove to think clearly. Gratton's words rang in her ears. They plunged her into panic. For scores of "friends" and hundreds of acquaintances she would furnish a topic of talk. Girls who were jealous of her would get into a warm flurry of excitement; Gloria could picture a dozen of them sitting at their telephones, calling up this, that, and the other Mabel and Ernestine, saying: "Oh, did you hear about Gloria Gaynor? Isn't it terrible! What could she have been thinking of? I knew she was——" and so forth and so on, "ringing interminable changes." Youth, though declared by the thoughtless to be a period of heedlessness, takes to heart far more seriously than does Age all happenings which touch its own interests. Pure tragedy is Youth's own realm. It feels acutely, its imaginings are fearful, it magnifies and distorts beyond all reason. Had Gloria been above thirty instead of under twenty this moment would have been far, far less deeply immersed in the gloom of despair. She suffered dry-eyed.

But Youth, condition of wedded extremes, while it holds tragedy to its bleeding heart, cannot entirely fail in time to listen to the voice of hope. Gloria clung passionately to the one straw offered her: Mark King had come; he had saved her, if only for the moment. If there were further salvation, it lay in Mark King. And so she came presently to a thought that made her sit bolt upright, that set her heart racing, that brought a new look into her eyes. Just now it had seemed so clear that only one thing could save her from clacking diatribes, from torture under the tongues of Ernestines and Mabels and daily newspapers— marriage with Gratton. But Gratton was gone and Mark King was here! If she married King! The "judge" was still here. King was her father's friend; between men like them there was nothing which would be denied when friendship asked. What if she went to King, saying to him straightforwardly: "Thus and such is my predicament. For my sake—for the sake of papa's daughter and hence for papa's sake no less—will you go through the form of marrying me? I shall be no burden; it will make no difference in your life. For to-morrow I will go back to San Francisco and you need never see me again. You can let me have a divorce; you will have lost nothing; I shall have been saved everything. Will you many me, Mark King?"

* * * * *

"Gloria!" King was calling. "Will you come down now? Everything's ready."

"Coming," answered Gloria. "Right away."

She glanced in her glass as she went out; the colour which had played hide-and-seek all day was again tinting her cheeks a delicate rose. What were fatigue and hunger when hope attended them?

But it happened that Gloria's impulse, which was at least honest and frank, was for a little held in abeyance, and thus it came about that she lost the opportunity to appear before Mark King at a critical moment as being straight-dealing, direct, and outspoken. She thanked him with her eyes for the lunch he had set forth for her; she gave him a quick little smile as he waited on her. He poured the coffee, gave her milk and sugar, brought the hot things from the stove. And all of the time there was in his eyes a look which he had no suspicion was there, the look of a man's adoration.

"He will do whatever I ask him to do," something sang within her.

"Won't you sit down with me, Mark?" she smiled at him.

And there, while one Gloria had determined to indulge in plain talk, the other Gloria came forward obliquely, demanding the place which had always been hers when it was a case of man and girl together. The smile was the smile of a coquette; it intoxicated; it made a man's heart beat hard; it brought him in close to her and thrust the world back. She could not have helped the smile or its message.

"I have eaten," he said a trifle harshly, she thought.

"You are so good to me." She stirred her coffee and he saw only the lashes and their black shadows on her cheeks. Then she said brightly: "This is our third little picnic together, isn't it?"

"Then you haven't forgotten? The others?" The words said themselves for him. The human comedy had begun, or the comedy begun long ago was resumed smoothly in its third act, King unconsciously answering to his cue. After that it was neither Gloria nor himself who played the part of stage-director; that time-honoured responsibility was back in the hands of the oldest of all stage-managers. The wind that drives autumn leaves scurrying, the sun that awakens spring buds were no more resistless or inevitable forces than the one now voicing its dictates.

"It would be—unmaidenly to ask him to marry you," whispered that other self within her. Oh, if she could only guess which was the real self, which the pretender! "And there is no need. Look at his eyes!"

King saw lying on the table the package done up in an old cloth which she had brought. Further, he knew that he had seen it before and where he had seen it. He knew that at last he had old Loony Honeycutt's secret where he could put out his hand to it, with none to gainsay him. He knew that with it was a message from his old friend Ben; that Ben, himself, lay at this moment in Coloma hurt. And yet his eyes clung to the eyes of Gloria and all of these things were swept aside in his mind. He saw that when her eyes came to a meeting with his the flush in her cheeks grew hotter. He tried to remember how he had come away from her in San Francisco; how he had given her up for all time. But that memory blurred; in its place he stood with her on a boulder in a creek, holding her in his arms; he stood with her on a mountain top, with the world lost below them. He sought to get a grip on himself; here and now was no time to talk to her of love. She was alone; it was his one job right now to take Ben's place, to protect her and efface his own madness. But was he mad? And was now no time, after all? She was alone, yes; but if some day she would marry him, was not now the time? What would he not give for the right to stop the nasty mouth of Gratton once and for all.

Fragmentary thoughts, by no means logically aligned. They came and went with other thoughts between, pro and con. But thoughts do not always sway destiny. In the crisis often enough there is no time for so slow a process as thinking; instinct leaps. Instinct compels. All of the thought in the world will not draw a steel needle to a bit of wood; all of the thought in the world will not hold back the same needle from a magnet. There are urges which must be obeyed, the urge of spinning worlds to circling suns, the urge of man to maid.

"Gloria!" he said huskily. "Gloria!"

"Yes, Mark?" she said quietly, trying to speak very calmly and as though she did not know, oh, so well, all that tumult that lay behind his calling her name. But despite her determination she was agitated; the moment had come; there was no stopping it. And did she want it? What did she want? What, exactly, did she feel?

She knew what was in his heart! His soul exulted as the certainty rushed upon him. She knew what he was going to say; words were needless between them. And the colour merely deepened in her cheeks while she hid her eyes from him.

He came to her swiftly. She rose as swiftly to her feet. He saw that a tremor shook her. He saw that she did not draw back from him; her eyes at last lifted to meet his own. They baffled him; he could not read their meaning. But they shone on him softly; they were the eyes of her whom he loved. Like magnet and steel they were swept together. He had her in his arms; he felt against his breast the wild flutter of her heart, against his face the soft brushing of her hair. He felt her body tense but unresisting in his arms; suddenly she relaxed, her head was against his breast. Gloria in his arms—Gloria's sweet face hidden from him against his rough shirt——

"Gloria!" he cried again. "Gloria!"

"The—the bacon!" gasped Gloria. "It's burning——"

She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance. King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy's.

"Gloria——"

"That's five times you've said 'Gloria,'" she informed him hurriedly. "And——Please, Mark," as he moved toward her. "And you haven't read papa's letter yet. And—and I'm dying to know what is in that funny package. Aren't you?"

"If I'm dying at all," he told her gravely, though he found a smile to answer her own—and two very serious smiles they were—"it is of quite another complaint. And this time——"

"But please, Mark! I am here all alone—with you—and——"

"I know. I haven't forgotten. But, Gloria——"

They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch. Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding's far from gentle voice cursing him.

King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria's look of distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one answer, even to Mark King.

"Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria," he said gravely. "Why not now?"

"It sounds like—like an advertisement, Mark," she laughed somewhat wildly.

"Poor little kid," he muttered, seeing how she trembled. "But, Gloria, why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren't you, dear? While this man is still here, won't you let him marry us? It will give me the right to shut that fool Gratton's mouth for him and——Oh, Gloria, my dear, my dear——"

She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.

"Will you, Gloria?"

And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no longer evasive "Yes."

"Now, Gloria?"

"Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me." She spoke humbly; at the instant she was humble. "But," she added hastily, "still you haven't read poor papa's letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark. I am going upstairs. I—I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am gone you can read papa's letter, and—and——" Her face was hot with blushes.

"And arrange with the judge," he said, his own voice uncertain. "Yes, Gloria."

She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the window and threw it up and called:

"Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and you here in ten minutes."

And then when Jim's voice had answered him he thought to take up the parcel on the table—largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt's. Something here for which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.

* * * * *

To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to bend them to a letter—this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben's words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone; Gaynor's letter was slipped into it:

"DEAR MARK:

"Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's. As I was going out of the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me. In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not see; it was just that near! They came close to killing me; when I came to I found they'd been through my pockets. I don't know how much Brodie knows. I do know he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God's sake, Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don't let the grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy; laid up this way I don't see a chance unless you find what we've been after so long and find it quick. Will you start without any delay? As soon as you get this phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you! Then I won't go crazy here with worry. And watch out for Gratton as well as Brodie.

"BEN."

A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last—Gus Ingle's message come to him across the dead years:

"Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he had found it because no man could have looked at that Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was enough there for everybody in all the world. We went down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all mine—we worked all seven until we dropped that day and night and early in the morning and the storm was coming but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug that I am setting right on top of right now how can a man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny's goast got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible and in the gorge—anyway that was Two. and I am all that is left and I am going—I tride to get out and the Big storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed me sure and big Brodie's gone he is crazy and cant never make it back across the mountains in this storm, and Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can look down in the gorge and see the water all white and snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the caives and if I write all this in the bible that was preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him half. You come up the old trail past where the thre Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles strate on and then there is the pass with the big black rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My god here goes.

"GUS INGLE."

To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.

"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"

* * * * *

Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming——



Chapter XV

"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see——"

"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her after all. Only to another man."

"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or every one else had gone crazy.

King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."

Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.

"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was—was extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence. It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it——"

"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.

"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could set that aside. But, if any one wanted to get me in bad, seeing there's no licence—well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make trouble with me."

King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then, "either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"

"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."

King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the "judge."

"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work, Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."

A might of money! King laughed.

"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."

This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking—she, too, remembered—how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him; she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And right there they were married—on Gus Ingle's old Bible.

"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God deal with me as I deal with you."

"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.

Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house. Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood. So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew two chairs up to it.

"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."

King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery and lonely death.

"And you know where it is?"

"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I, Mrs. King!"

"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"

"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have lost the game!"

"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"

"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the telephone in Ben's study.

"I—I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.

"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it that nothing's going to stop me! And—that I've just married Gloria!'"

But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there. Mamma."

"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.