A week elapsed. Miss Budd was in Sacramento, and the landlord of the Big Flume Hotel was standing at his usual post in the doorway during dinner, when a waiter handed him a note. It contained a single line scrawled in pencil:--
"Come out and see me behind the house as before. I dussent come in on account of her. C. BYERS."
"On account of 'her'!" Abner cast a hurried glance around the tables. Certainly Mrs. Byers was not there! He walked in the hall and the veranda--she was not there. He hastened to the rendezvous evidently meant by the writer, the wilderness behind the house.
Sure enough, Byers, drunk and maudlin, supporting himself by the tree root, staggered forward, clasped him in his arms, and murmured hoarsely,--
"She's gone!"
"Gone?" echoed Abner, with a whitening face. "Mrs. Byers? Where?"
"Run away! Never come back no more! Gone!"
A vague idea that had been in Abner's mind since Byers's last visit now took awful shape. Before the unfortunate Byers could collect his senses he felt himself seized in a giant's grasp and forced against the tree.
"You coward!" said all that was left of the tolerant Abner--his even voice--"you hound! Did you dare to abuse her? to lay your vile hands on her--to strike her? Answer me."
The shock--the grasp--perhaps Abner's words, momentarily silenced Byers. "Did I strike her?" he said dazedly; "did I abuse her? Oh, yes!" with deep irony. "Certainly! In course! Look yer, pardner!"--he suddenly dragged up his sleeve from his red, hairy arm, exposing a blue cicatrix in its centre--"that's a jab from her scissors about three months ago; look yer!"--he bent his head and showed a scar along the scalp--"that's her playfulness with a fire shovel! Look yer!"--he quickly opened his collar, where his neck and cheek were striped and crossed with adhesive plaster--"that's all that was left o' a glass jar o' preserves--the preserves got away, but some of the glass got stuck! That's when she heard I was a di-vorced man and hadn't told her."
"Were you a di-vorced man?" gasped Abner.
"You know that; in course I was," said Byers scornfully; "d'ye meanter say she didn't tell ye?"
"She?" echoed Abner vaguely. "Your wife--you said just now she didn't know it before."
"My wife ez oncet was, I mean! Mary Ellen--your wife ez is to be," said Byers, with deep irony. "Oh, come now. Pretend ye don't know! Hi there! Hands off! Don't strike a man when he's down, like I am."
But Abner's clutch of Byers's shoulder relaxed, and he sank down to a sitting posture on the root. In the meantime Byers, overcome by a sense of this new misery added to his manifold grievances, gave way to maudlin silent tears.
"Mary Ellen--your first wife?" repeated Abner vacantly.
"Yesh!" said Byers thickly, "my first wife--shelected and picked out fer your shecond wife--by your first--like d----d conundrum.
How wash I t'know?" he said, with a sudden shriek of public expostulation--"thash what I wanter know. Here I come to talk with fr'en', like man to man, unshuspecting, innoshent as chile, about my shecond wife! Fr'en' drops out, carryin' off the whiskey. Then I hear all o' suddent voice o' Mary Ellen talkin' in kitchen; then I come round softly and see Mary Ellen--my wife as useter be--standin' at fr'en's kitchen winder. Then I lights out quicker 'n lightnin' and scoots! And when I gets back home, I ups and tells my wife. And whosh fault ish't! Who shaid a man oughter tell hish wife? You! Who keepsh other mensh' first wivesh at kishen winder to frighten 'em to tell? You!"
But a change had already come over the face of Abner Langworthy.
The anger, anxiety, astonishment, and vacuity that was there had vanished, and he looked up with his usual resigned acceptance of the inevitable as he said, "I reckon that's so! And seein' it's so," with good-natured tolerance, he added, "I reckon I'll break rules for oncet and stand ye another drink."
He stood another drink and yet another, and eventually put the doubly widowed Byers to bed in his own room. These were but details of a larger tribulation,--and yet he knew instinctively that his cup was not yet full. The further drop of bitterness came a few days later in a line from Mary Ellen: "I needn't tell you that all betwixt you and me is off, and you kin tell your old woman that her selection for a second wife for you wuz about as bad as your own first selection. Ye kin tell Mr. Byers--yer great friend whom ye never let on ye knew--that when I want another husband I shan't take the trouble to ask him to fish one out for me. It would be kind--but confusin'."
He never heard from her again. Mr. Byers was duly notified that Mrs. Byers had commenced action for divorce in another state in which concealment of a previous divorce invalidated the marriage, but he did not respond. The two men became great friends--and assured celibates. Yet they always spoke reverently of their "wife," with the touching prefix of "our."
"She was a good woman, pardner," said Byers.
"And she understood us," said Abner resignedly.
Perhaps she had.