"I reckon. I can't understand, but I'll respect your feelin's."
"Because you--oh, because you love me?...Eighteen years! You were that terrible Lassiter! And now--because you love me?"
"That's it, Jane."
"Oh, you'll make me love you! How can I help but love you? My heart must be stone. But--oh, Lassiter, wait, wait! Give me time.
I'm not what I was. Once it was so easy to love. Now it's easy to hate. Wait! My faith in God--some God--still lives. By it I see happier times for you, poor passion-swayed wanderer! For me--a miserable, broken woman. I loved your sister Milly. I will love you. I can't have fallen so low--I can't be so abandoned by God--that I've no love left to give you. Wait! Let us forget Milly's sad life. Ah, I knew it as no one else on earth! There's one thing I shall tell you--if you are at my death-bed, but I can't speak now."
"I reckon I don't want to hear no more," said Lassiter.
Jane leaned against him, as if some pent-up force had rent its way out, she fell into a paroxy** of weeping. Lassiter held her in silent sympathy. By degrees she regained composure, and she was rising, sensible of being relieved of a weighty burden, when a sudden start on Lassiter's part alarmed her.
"I heard hosses--hosses with muffled hoofs!" he said; and he got up guardedly.
"Where's Fay?" asked Jane, hurriedly glancing round the shady knoll. The bright-haired child, who had appeared to be close all the time, was not in sight.
"Fay!" called Jane.
No answering shout of glee. No patter of flying feet. Jane saw Lassiter stiffen.
"Fay--oh--Fay!" Jane almost screamed.
The leaves quivered and rustled; a lonesome cricket chirped in the grass, a bee hummed by. The silence of the waning afternoon breathed hateful portent. It terrified Jane. When had silence been so infernal?
"She's--only--strayed--out--of earshot," faltered Jane, looking at Lassiter.
Pale, rigid as a statue, the rider stood, not in listening, searching posture, but in one of doomed certainty. Suddenly he grasped Jane with an iron hand, and, turning his face from her gaze, he strode with her from the knoll.
"See--Fay played here last--a house of stones an' sticks....An' here's a corral of pebbles with leaves for hosses," said Lassiter, stridently, and pointed to the ground. "Back an' forth she trailed here....See, she's buried somethin'--a dead grasshopper--there's a tombstone... here she went, chasin' a lizard--see the tiny streaked trail...she pulled bark off this cottonwood...look in the dust of the path--the letters you taught her--she's drawn pictures of birds en' hosses an' people....Look, a cross! Oh, Jane, your cross!"
Lassiter dragged Jane on, and as if from a book read the meaning of little Fay's trail. All the way down the knoll, through the shrubbery, round and round a cottonwood, Fay's vagrant fancy left records of her sweet musings and innocent play. Long had she lingered round a bird-nest to leave therein the gaudy wing of a butterfly. Long had she played beside the running stream sending adrift vessels freighted with pebbly cargo. Then she had wandered through the deep grass, her tiny feet scarcely turning a fragile blade, and she had dreamed beside some old faded flowers. Thus her steps led her into the broad lane. The little dimpled imprints of her bare feet showed clean-cut in the dust they went a little way down the lane; and then, at a point where they stopped, the great tracks of a man led out from the shrubbery and returned.