Allie stared with strained eyes.  They were there—­in the blackness—­ those noble men who had died for her in vain.  No—­not in vain!  She breathed a prayer for them—­a word of love for Larry.  Larry, the waster of life, yet the faithful, the symbol of brotherhood.  As long as she lived she would see him stalk before her with his red, blazing fire, his magnificent effrontery, his supreme will.  He, who had been the soul of chivalry, the meekest of men before a woman, the inheritor of a reverence for womanhood, had ruthlessly shot out of his way that wonderful white-armed Beauty Stanton.

She, too, must lie there in the shadow.  Allie shivered with the cool desert wind that blew in her face from the shadowy spaces.  She shut her eyes to hide the dim passing traces of terrible Benton and the darkness that hid the lonely graves.

The train moved on and on, leaving what had been Benton far behind; and once more Allie opened her weary eyes to the dim, obscure reaches of the desert.  Her heart beat very slowly under its leaden weight, its endless pang.  Her blood flowed at low ebb.  She felt the long-forgotten recurrence of an old morbid horror, like a poison lichen fastening upon the very spring of life.  It passed and came again, and left her once more.  Her thoughts wandered back along the night track she had traversed, until again her ears were haunted by that strange sound which had given Roaring City its name.  She had been torn away from hope, love, almost life itself.  Where was Neale?  He had turned from her, obedient to Allison Lee and the fatal complexity and perversenes’s of life.  The vindication of her spiritual faith and the answer to her prayers lay in the fact that she had been saved; but rather than to be here in this car, daughter of a rich father, but separated from Neale, she would have preferred to fill one of the nameless graves in Benton.

33

The sun set pale-gold and austere as Neale watched the train bear Allie Lee away.  No thought of himself entered into that solemn moment of happiness.  Allie Lee—­alive—­safe—­her troubles ended—­on her way home with her father!  The long train wound round the bold bluff and at last was gone.  For Neale the moment held something big, final.  A phase—­a part of his life ended there.

“Son, it’s over,” said Slingerland, who watched with him.  “Allie’s gone home—­back to whar she belongs—­to come into her own.  Thank God!  An’ you—­why this day turns you back to whar you was once....  Allie owes her life to you an’ her father’s life.  Think, son, of these hyar times—­how much wuss it might hev been.”

Neale’s sense of thankfulness was unutterable.  Passively he went with Slingerland, silent and gentle.  The trapper dressed his wounds, tended him, kept men away from him, and watched by him as if he were a sick child.

Neale suffered only the weakness following the action and stress of great passion.  His mind seemed full of beautiful solemn bells of blessing, resonant, ringing the wonder of an everlasting unchangeable truth.  Night fell—­the darkness thickened—­the old trapper kept his vigil—­and Neale sank to sleep, and the sweet, low-toned bells claimed him in his dreams.