"It"s a fact," Bob insisted. "I know his connection with all this better than you do, and his being on this road was no accident. It was to see his orders carried out."
Ware was looking at him shrewdly.
"That fits," he declared. "I couldn"t figure why my old friend Bill didn"t cut loose. But he"s got a head on him."
"What do you mean?"
"Why, when he see Oldham dropped, what use was there of going to shooting? It would just make trouble for him and he couldn"t hope for no pay. He just faded."
"He"s a quick thinker, then," said Bob.
"You bet you!"
The two men laid Oldham"s body under the shade. As they disposed it decently, Bob experienced again that haunting sense of having known him elsewhere that had on several occasions a.s.sailed his memory. The man"s face was familiar to him with a familiarity that Bob somehow felt antedated his California acquaintance.
"We must get to the mill and send a wagon for him," Ware was saying.
But Amy suddenly turned faint, and was unable to proceed.
"It"s perfectly silly of me!" she cried indignantly. "The idea of my feeling faint! It makes me so angry!"
"It"s perfectly natural," Bob told her. "I think you"ve shown a heap of nerve. Most girls would have flopped over."
The men helped her to a streamlet some hundreds of yards away. Here it was agreed that Ware should proceed in search of a conveyance; and that Bob and Amy should there await his return.
x.x.xVI
Ware disappeared rapidly up the dusty road, Bob and Amy standing side by side in silence, watching him go. When the lean, long figure of the old mountaineer had quite disappeared, and the light, eddying dust, peculiar to the Sierra country, had died, Amy closed her eyes, raised her hand to her heart, and sank slowly to the bank of the little creek. Her vivid colour, which had for a moment returned under the influence of her strong will and her indignation over her weakness, had again ebbed from her cheeks.
Bob, with an exclamation of alarm, dropped to her side and pa.s.sed his arm back of her shoulders. As she felt the presence of his support, she let slip the last desperate holdings of physical command, and leaned back gratefully, breathing hard, her eyes still closed.
After a moment she opened them long enough to smile palely at the anxious face of the young man.
"It"s all right," she said. "I"m all right. Don"t be alarmed. Just let me rest a minute. I"ll be all right."
She closed her eyes again. Bob, watching, saw the colour gradually flowing up under her skin, and was rea.s.sured.
The girl lay against his arm limply. At first he was concerned merely with the supporting of the slight burden; careful to hold her as comfortably as possible. Then the warmth of her body penetrated to his arm. A new emotion invaded him, feeble in the beginning, but gaining strength from instant to instant. It mounted his breast as a tide would mount, until it had shortened his breath, set his heart to thumping dully, choked his throat. He looked down at her with troubled eyes, following the curve of her upturned face, the long line of her throat exposed by the backward thrown position of her head, the swell of her breast under the thin gown. The helplessness of the pose caught at Bob"s heart. For the first time Amy--the vivid, self-reliant, capable, laughing Amy--appealed to him as a being demanding protection, as a woman with a woman"s instinctive craving for cherishing, as a delicious, soft, feminine creature, calling forth the tendernesses of a man"s heart. In the normal world of everyday a.s.sociation this side of her had never been revealed, never suspected; yet now, here, it rose up to throw into insignificance all the other qualities of the girl he had known.
Bob spared a swift thought of grat.i.tude to the chance that had revealed to him this unguessed, intimate phase of womanhood.
And then the insight with which the significant moment had endowed him leaped to the simple comprehension of another thought--that this revelation of intimacy, of the woman-appeal lying unguessed beneath the comradeship of everyday life, was after all only a matter of chance. It had been revealed to him by the accident of a moment"s faintness, by which the conscious will of the girl had been driven back from the defences. In a short time it would be over. She would resume her ordinary demeanour, her ordinary interest, her ordinary bright, cheerful, attractive, matter-of-fact, efficient self. Everything would be as before. But--and here Bob"s breath came quickest--in the great goodness of the world lay another possibility; that sometime, at the call of some one person, for that one and no other, this inner beautiful soul of the feminine appeal would come forth freely, consciously, willingly.
Amy opened her eyes, sat up, shook herself slightly, and laughed.
"I"m all right now," she told Bob, "and certainly very much ashamed."
"Amy!" he stammered.
She shot a swift look at him, and immediately arose to her feet.
"We will have to testify at a coroner"s inquest, I presume," said she, in the most matter-of-fact tones.
"I suppose so," agreed Bob morosely. It is impossible to turn back all the strongly set currents of life without at least a temporary turmoil.
Amy glanced at him sideways, and smiled a faint, wise smile to herself.
For in these matters, while men are more a.n.a.lytical after the fact, women are by nature more informed. She said nothing, but stooped to the creek for a drink. When she had again straightened to her feet, Bob had come to himself. The purport of Amy"s last speech had fully penetrated his understanding, and one word of it--the word _testify_--had struck him with an idea.
"By Jove!" he cried, "that lets out Pollock!"
"What?" said Amy.
"This man Oldham was the only witness who could have convicted George Pollock of killing Plant."
"What do you mean?" asked Amy, leaning forward interestedly. "Was he there? How do you know about it?"
A half-hour before Bob would have hesitated long before confiding his secret to a fourth party; but now, for him, the world of relations had shifted.
"I"ll tell you about it," said he, without hesitation; "but this is serious. You must never breathe even a word of it to any one!"
"Certainly not!" cried Amy.
"Oldham wasn"t an actual witness of the killing; but I was, and he knew it. He could have made me testify by informing the prosecuting attorney."
Bob sketched rapidly his share in the tragedy: how he had held Pollock"s horse, and been in a way an accessory to the deed. Amy listened attentively to the recital of the facts, but before Bob had begun to draw his conclusions, she broke in swiftly.
"So Oldham offered to let you off, if you would keep out of this Modoc Land case," said she.
Bob nodded.
"That was it."
"But it would have put you in the penitentiary," she pointed out.
"Well, the case wasn"t quite decided yet."
She made her quaint gesture of the happily up-thrown hands.
"Just what you said about Mr. Welton!" she cried. "Oh, I"m _glad_ you told me this! I was trying so hard to think you were doing a high and n.o.ble duty in ignoring the consequences to that poor old man. But I could not. Now I see!"
"What do you mean?" asked Bob curiously, as she paused.
"You could do it because your act placed you in worse danger," she told him.
"Too many for me," Bob disclaimed. "I simply wasn"t going to be bluffed out by that gang!"