This hall was unusually crowded, and the scene had the number of men, though not the women and the hilarity and the gold, that was characteristic of pay-day in Benton. All the tables in the gambling-room were occupied.
Beauty Stanton stepped into this crowded room, her golden head uncovered, white and rapt and strangely dark-eyed, with all the beauty of her girlhood returned, and added to it that of a woman transformed, supreme in her crowning hour. As a bad woman, infatuated and piqued, she had failed to allure Neale to baseness; now as a good woman, with pure motive, she would win his friendship, his eternal grat.i.tude.
Stanton had always been a target for eyes, yet never as now, when she drew every gaze like a dazzling light in a dark room.
As soon as she saw Neale she forgot every one else in that hall. He was gambling. He did not look up. His brow was somber and dark.
She approached--stood behind him. Some of the players spoke to her, familiarly, as was her bitter due. Then Neale turned apparently to bow with his old courtesy. Thrill on thrill coursed over her. Always he had showed her respect, deference.
Her heart was full. She had never before enjoyed a moment like this. She was about to separate him from the baneful and pernicious life of the camps--to tender him a gift of unutterable happiness--to give all of him back to the work of the great railroad.
She put a trembling hand on his shoulder--bent over him. "Neale--come with me," she whispered.
He shook his head.
"Yes! Yes!" she returned, her voice thrilling with emotion.
Wearily, with patient annoyance, he laid down his cards and looked up.
His dark eyes held faint surprise and something that she thought might be pity.
"Miss Stanton--pardon me--but please understand--No!"
Then he turned and, picking up his cards, resumed the game.
Beauty Stanton suffered a sudden vague check. It was as if a cold thought was trying to enter a warm and glowing mind. She found speech difficult. She could not get off the track of her emotional flight. Her woman"s wit, tact, knowledge of men, would not operate.
"Neale!... Come with--me!" she cried, brokenly. "There"s--"
Some men laughed coa.r.s.ely. That did not mean anything to Stanton until she saw how it affected Neale. His face flushed red and his hands clenched the cards.
"Say, Neale," spoke up this brutal gamester, with a sneer, "never mind us. Go along with your lady friend... You"re ahead of the game--as I reckon she sees."
Neale threw the cards in the man"s face; then, rising, he bent over to slap him so violently as to knock him off his chair.
The crash stilled the room. Every man turned to watch.
Neale stood up, his right arm down, menacingly. The gambler arose, cursing, but made no move to draw a weapon.
Beauty Stanton could not, to save her life, speak the words she wanted to say. Something impeding, totally unexpected, seemed to have arisen.
"Neale--come with--me!" was all she could say.
"No!" he declared, vehemently, with a gesture of disgust and anger.
That, following the coa.r.s.e implication of the gambler, conveyed to Stanton what all these men imagined. The fools! The fools! A hot vibrating change occurred in her emotion, but she controlled it. Neale turned his back upon her. The crowd saw and many laughed. Stanton felt the sting of her pride, the leap of her blood. She was misunderstood, but what was that to her? As Neale stepped away she caught his arm--held him while she tried to get close to him so she could whisper. He shook her off. His face was black with anger. He held up one hand in a gesture that any woman would have understood and hated. It acted powerfully upon Beauty Stanton. Neale believed she was importuning him. To him her look, whisper, touch had meant only the same as to these coa.r.s.e human animals gaping and grinning as they listened. The sweetest and best and most exalted moment she had ever known was being made bitter as gall, sickening, hateful. She must speak openly, she must make him understand.
"Allie Lee!... At my house!" burst out Stanton, and then, as if struck by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.
The change in Neale was swift, terrible. Not comprehension, but pa.s.sion transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious, agonized, acting in seeming righteous and pa.s.sionate repudiation of a sacrilege.
"------!" His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton"s soul into h.e.l.lish revolt. Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her. He struck her--hard--across the mouth.
"Don"t breathe that name!"
Beauty Stanton"s fear suddenly broke. Blindly she ran out into the street. She fell once--jostled against a rail. The lights blurred; the street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through deadened ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and unreal.
"He struck me! He called me------!" she gasped. And the exaltation of the last hour vanished as if it had never been. All the pa.s.sion of her stained and evil years leaped into ascendency. "h.e.l.l--h.e.l.l! I"ll have him knifed--I"ll see him dying! I"ll wet my hands in his blood! I"ll spit in his face as he dies!"
So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house. There is no flame of hate so sudden and terrible and intense as that of the lost woman. Beauty Stanton"s blood had turned to vitriol. Men had wronged her, ruined her, dragged her down into the mire. One by one, during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave behind something evil in exchange. She was what they had made her. Her soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea. Her heart was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires. Her body was a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs. The weight of all the iron and stone used in the construction of the great railroad was the burden upon her shoulders. These dark streams of humanity pa.s.sing her in the street, these beasts of men, these hairy-breasted toilers, had found in her and her kind the strength or the incentive to endure, to build, to go on. And one of them, stupid, selfish, merciless, a man whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself--he had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no pardon from her cla.s.s, a name that evoked all the furies and the powers of h.e.l.l.
"Oh, to cut him--to torture him--to burn him alive... But it would not be enough!" she panted.
And into the mind that had been lately fixed in happy consciousness of her power of good there flashed a thousand scintillating, corruscating gleams of evil thought. And then came a crowning one, an inspiration straight from h.e.l.l.
"By G.o.d! I"ll make of Allie Lee the thing I am! The thing he struck--the thing he named!"
The woman in Beauty Stanton ceased to be. All that breathed, in that hour, was what men had made her. Revenge, only a word! Murder, nothing!
Life, an implacable, inexplicable, impossible flux and reflux of human pa.s.sion! Reason, intelligence, n.o.bility, love, womanhood, motherhood--all the heritage of her s.e.x--had been warped by false and abnormal and terrible strains upon her physical and emotional life. No tigress, no cannibal, no savage, no man, no living creature except a woman of grace who knew how far she had fallen could have been capable of Beauty Stanton"s deadly and immutable pa.s.sion to destroy. Thus life and nature avenged her. Her hate was immeasurable. She who could have walked naked and smiling down the streets of Benton or out upon the barren desert to die for the man she loved had in her the inconceivable and mysterious pa.s.sion of the fallen woman; she could become a flame, a scourge, a fatal wind, a devastation. She was fire to man; to her own s.e.x, ice. Stanton reached her house and entered. Festivities in honor of the last night of Benton were already riotously in order. She placed herself well back in the shadow and watched the wide door.
"The first man who enters I"ll give him this key!" she hissed.
She was unsteady on her feet. All her frame quivered. The lights in the hall seemed to have a reddish tinge. She watched. Several men pa.s.sed out. Then a tall, stalking form appeared, entering.
A ball of fire in Stanton"s breast leaped and burst. She had recognized in that entering form the wildest, the most violent and the most dangerous man in Benton--Larry Red King.
Stanton stepped forward and for the first time in the cowboy"s presence she did not experience that singular chill of gloom which he was wont to inspire in her.
Her eyes gloated over King. Tall, lean, graceful, easy, with his flushed ruddy face and his flashing blue eyes and the upstanding red hair, he looked exactly what he was--a handsome red devil, fearing no man or thing, h.e.l.l-bent in his cool, reckless wildness.
He appeared to be half-drunk. Stanton was trained to read the faces of men who entered there; and what she saw in King"s added the last and crowning throb of joy to her hate. If she had been given her pick of the devils in Benton she would have selected this stalking, gun-packing cowboy.
"Larry, I"ve a new girl here," she said. "Come."
"Evenin", Miss--Stanton," he drawled. He puffed slightly, after the manner of men under the influence of liquor, and a wicked, boyish, heated smile crossed his face.
She led him easily. But his heavy gun b.u.mped against her, giving her little cold shudders. The pa.s.sage opened into a wide room, which in turn opened into her dancing-hall. She saw strange, eager, dark faces among the men present, but in her excitement she did not note them particularly. She led Larry across the wide room, up a stairway to another hall, and down this to the corner of an intersecting pa.s.sageway.
"Take--this--key!" she whispered. Her hand shook. She felt herself to be a black and monstrous creature. All of Benton seemed driving her.
She was another woman. This was her fling at a rotten world, her slap in Neale"s face. But she could not speak again; her lips failed. She pointed to a door.
She waited long enough to see the stalking, graceful cowboy halt in front of the right door. Then she fled.
27
For many moments after the beautiful bare-armed woman closed and locked the door Allie Lee sat in ecstasy, in trembling antic.i.p.ation of Neale.
Gradually, however, in intervals of happy mind-wanderings, other thoughts intruded. This little bedroom affected her singularly and she was at a loss to account for the fact. It did not seem that she was actually afraid to be there, for she was glad. Fear of Durade and his gang recurred, but she believed that the time of her deliverance was close at hand. Possibly Durade, with some of his men, had been killed in the fight with Hough. Then she remembered having heard the Spaniard order Fresno and Mull to go round by the street. They must be on her trail at this very moment. Ancliffe had been seen, and not much time could elapse before her whereabouts would be discovered. But Allie bore up bravely. She was in the thick of grim and b.l.o.o.d.y and horrible reality. Those brave men, strangers to her, had looked into her face, questioned her, then had died for her. It was all so unbelievable. In another room, close to her, lay Ancliffe, dead. Allie tried not to think of him; of the remorseless way in which he had killed the Mexican; of the contrast between this action and his gentle voice and manner. She tried not to think of the gambler Hough--the cold iron cast of his face as he won Durade"s gold, the strange, intent look which he gave her a moment before the attack. There was something magnificent in Ancliffe"s bringing her to a refuge while he was dying; there was something magnificent in Hough"s standing off the gang. Allie divined that through her these two men had fought and died for something in themselves as well as for her honor and life.