“Oh, my God!” she breathed.  “Take them away—­take them away!”

She staggered back to the tent, and stood there with her hands covering her face.  Aldous turned to the old hunter and gave him the things he held.

A moment later he stood alone where the three had been, staring now as Joanne had stared, his heart beating wildly.

For Joanne, in entering the tent, had uncovered her face; it was not grief that he saw there, but the soul of a woman new-born.  And as his own soul responded in a wild rejoicing, MacDonald, going over the summit and down into the hollow, mumbled in his beard: 

“God ha’ mercy on me!  I’m doin’ it for her an’ Johnny, an’ because she’s like my Jane!”

CHAPTER XVI

Plunged from one extreme of mental strain to another excitement that was as acute in its opposite effect, John Aldous stood and stared at the tent-flap that had dropped behind Joanne.  Only a flash he had caught of her face; but in that flash he had seen the living, quivering joyousness of freedom blazing where a moment before there had been only horror and fear.  As if ashamed of her own betrayal, Joanne had darted into the tent.  She had answered his question a thousand times more effectively than if she had remained to tell him with her lips that MacDonald’s proofs were sufficient—­that the grave in the little box canyon had not disappointed her.  She had recognized the ring and the watch; from them she had shrank in horror, as if fearing that the golden serpent might suddenly leap into life and strike.

In spite of the mightiest efforts she might have made for self-control Aldous had seen in her tense and tortured face a look that was more than either dread or shock—­it was abhorrence, hatred.  And his last glimpse of her face had revealed those things gone, and in their place the strange joy she had run into the tent to hide.  That she should rejoice over the dead, or that the grim relics from the grave should bring that new dawn into her face and eyes, did not strike him as shocking.  In Joanne his sun had already begun to rise and set.  He had come to understand that for her the grave must hold its dead; that the fact of death, death under the slab that bore Mortimer FitzHugh’s name, meant life for her, just as it meant life and all things for him.  He had prayed for it, even while he dreaded that it might not be.  In him all things were now submerged in the wild thought that Joanne was free, and the grave had been the key to her freedom.

A calmness began to possess him that was in singular contrast to the perturbed condition of his mind a few minutes before.  From this hour Joanne was his to fight for, to win if he could; and, knowing this, his soul rose in triumph above his first physical exultation, and he fought back the almost irresistible impulse to follow her into the tent and tell her what this day had meant for him.  Following this came