“What do you yourself mean?” He turned to her in agony of soul.  “You will not let me repent?  You will not give me some sort of chance?”

“No,” she said coldly.  “You have had chance enough to be a gentleman—­as much as you had when you were in Mexico with other women.  But Major William Banion falsified the regimental accounts.  I know that too.  I didn’t—­I couldn’t believe it—­till now.”

He remained dumb under this.  She went on mercilessly.

“Oh, yes, Captain Woodhull told us.  Yes, he showed us the very vouchers.  My father believed it of you, but I didn’t.  Now I do.  Oh, fine!  And you an officer of our Army!”

She blazed out at him now, her temper rising.

“Chance?  What more chance did you need?  No wonder you couldn’t love a girl—­any other way than this.  It would have to be sometime, you say.  What do you mean?  That I’d ever marry a thief?”

Still he could not speak.  The fire marks showed livid against a paling cheek.

“Yes, I know you saved me—­twice, this time at much risk,” resumed the girl.  “Did you want pay so soon?  You’d—­you’d—­”

“Oh!  Oh!  Oh!”

It was his voice that now broke in.  He could not speak at all beyond the exclamation under torture.

“I didn’t believe that story about you,” she added after a long time.  “But you are not what you looked, not what I thought you were.  So what you say must be sometime is never going to be at all.”

“Did he tell you that about me?” demanded Will Banion savagely.  “Woodhull—­did he say that?”

“I have told you, yes.  My father knew.  No wonder he didn’t trust you.  How could he?”

She moved now as though to leave the wagon, but he raised a hand.

“Wait!” said he.  “Look yonder!  You’d not have time now to reach camp.”

In the high country a great prairie fire usually or quite often was followed by a heavy rainstorm.  What Banion now indicated was the approach of yet another of the epic phenomena of the prairies, as rapid, as colossal and as merciless as the fire itself.

On the western horizon a low dark bank of clouds lay for miles, piled, serrated, steadily rising opposite to the course of the wind that had driven the fire.  Along it more and more visibly played almost incessant sheet lightning, broken with ripping zigzag flames.  A hush had fallen close at hand, for now even the frightened breeze of evening had fled.  Now and then, at first doubtful, then unmistakable and continuous, came the mutter and rumble and at length the steady roll of thunder.

They lay full in the course of one of the tremendous storms of the high country, and as the cloud bank rose and came on swiftly, spreading its flanking wings so that nothing might escape, the spectacle was terrifying almost as much as that of the fire, for, unprotected, as they were, they could make no counter battle against the storm.