shawl thrown over him, lay the wounded man.
Key started back. It was Collinson!
His head and shoulders seemed uninjured; but as Key lifted the shawl,
he saw that the long, lank figure appeared to melt away below the waist
into a mass of shapeless and dirty rags. Key hurriedly replaced the
shawl, and, bending over him, listened to his hurried respiration and
the beating of his heart. Then he pressed a drinking-flask to his
lips. The spirit seemed to revive him; he slowly opened his eyes.
They fell upon Key with quick recognition. But the look changed; one
could see that he was trying to rise, but that no movement of the limbs
accompanied that effort of will, and his old patient, resigned look
returned. Key shuddered. There was some injury to the spine. The man
was paralyzed.
"I can't get up, Mr. Key," he said in a faint but untroubled voice,
"nor seem to move my arms, but you'll just allow that I've shook hands
with ye--all the same."
"How did this happen?" said Key anxiously.
"Thet's wot gets me! Sometimes I reckon I know, and sometimes I don't.
Lyin' thar on thet ledge all last night, and only jest able to look
down into the old valley, sometimes it seemed to me ez if I fell over
and got caught in the rocks trying to save my wife; but then when I kem
to think sensible, and know my wife wasn't there at all, I get
mystified. Sometimes I think I got ter thinkin' of my wife only when
this yer young gal thet's bin like an angel to me kem here and dragged
me off the ledge, for you see she don't belong here, and hez dropped on
to me like a sperrit."
"Then you were not in the house when the shock came?" said Key.
"No. You see the mill was filled with them fellers as the sheriff was
arter, and it went over with 'em--and I"--
"Alice," said Key, with a white face, "would you mind going to my
horse, which you will find somewhere near yours, and bringing me a
medicine case from my saddle-bags?"
The innocent girl glanced quickly at her companion, saw the change in
his face, and, attributing it to the imminent danger of the injured
man, at once glided away. When she was out of hearing, Key leaned
gravely over him:--
"Collinson, I must trust you with a secret. I am afraid that this poor
girl who helped you is the sister of the leader of that gang the
sheriff was in pursuit of. She has been kept in perfect ignorance of
her brother's crimes. She must NEVER know them--nor even know his
fate! If he perished utterly in this catastrophe, as it would seem--it
was God's will to spare her that knowledge. I tell you this, to warn
you in anything you say before her. She MUST believe, as I shall try
to make her believe, that he has gone back to the States--where she
will perhaps, hereafter, believe that he died. Better that she should
know nothing--and keep her thought of him unchanged."
"I see--I see--I see, Mr. Key," murmured the injured man. "Thet's wot
I've been sayin' to myself lyin' here all night. Thet's wot I bin
sayin' o' my wife Sadie,--her that I actooally got to think kem back to
me last night. You see I'd heerd from one o' those fellars that a
woman like unto her had been picked up in Texas and brought on yere,
and that mebbe she was somewhar in Californy. I was that foolish--and
that ontrue to her, all the while knowin', as I once told you, Mr. Key,
that ef she'd been alive she'd bin yere--that I believed it true for a
minit! And that was why, afore this happened, I had a dream, right out
yer, and dreamed she kem to me, all white and troubled, through the
woods. At first I thought it war my Sadie; but when I see she warn't
like her old self, and her voice was strange and her laugh was
strange--then I knowed it wasn't her, and I was dreamin'. You're
right, Mr. Key, in wot you got off just now--wot was it? Better to
know nothin'--and keep the old thoughts unchanged."
"Have you any pain?" asked Key after a pause.
"No; I kinder feel easier now."
Key looked at his changing face. "Tell me," he said gently, "if it
does not tax your strength, all that has happened here, all you know.
It is for HER sake."
Thus adjured, with his eyes fixed on Key, Collinson narrated his story
from the irruption of the outlaws to the final catastrophe. Even then
he palliated their outrage with his characteristic patience, keeping
still his strange fascination for Chivers, and his blind belief in his
miserable wife. The story was at times broken by lapses of faintness,
by a singular return of his old abstraction and forgetfulness in the
midst of a sentence, and at last by a fit of coughing that left a few
crimson bubbles on the corners of his month. Key lifted his eyes
anxiously; there was some grave internal injury, which the dying man's
resolute patience had suppressed. Yet, at the sound of Alice's
returning step, Collinson's eyes brightened, apparently as much at her
coming as from the effect of the powerful stimulant Key had taken from
his medicine case.
"I thank ye, Mr. Key," he said faintly; "for I've got an idea I ain't
got no great time before me, and I've got suthin' to say to you, afore
witnesses"--his eyes sought Alice's in half apology--"afore witnesses,
you understand. Would you mind standin' out thar, afore me, in the
light, so I kin see you both, and you, miss, rememberin', ez a witness,
suthin' I got to tell to him? You might take his hand, miss, to make
it more regular and lawlike."
The two did as he bade them, standing side by side, painfully humoring
what seemed to them to be wanderings of a dying man.
"Thar was a young fellow," said Collinson in a steady voice, "ez kem to
my shanty a night ago on his way to the--the--valley. He was a
sprightly young fellow, gay and chipper-like, and he sez to me,
confidential-like, 'Collinson,' sez he, 'I'm off to the States this
very night on business of importance; mebbe I'll be away a long
time--for years! You know,' sez he, 'Mr. Key, in the Hollow! Go to
him,' sez he, 'and tell him ez how I hadn't time to get to see him;
tell him,' sez he, 'that RIVERS'--you've got the name, Mr. Key?--you've
got the name, miss?--'that RIVERS wants him to say this to his little
sister from her lovin' brother. And tell him,' sez he, this yer
RIVERS, 'to look arter her, being alone.' You remember that, Mr. Key?
you remember it, miss? You see, I remembered it, too, being, so to
speak, alone myself"--he paused, and added in a faint whisper--"till
now."
Then he was silent. That innocent lie was the first and last upon his
honest lips; for as they stood there, hand in hand, they saw his plain,
hard face take upon itself, at first, the gray, ashen hues of the rocks
around him, and then and thereafter something of the infinite
tranquillity and peace of that wilderness in which he had lived and
died, and of which he was a part.
Contemporaneous history was less kindly. The "Bald Top Sentinel"
congratulated its readers that the late seismic disturbance was
accompanied with very little loss of life, if any. "It is reported
that the proprietor of a low shebeen for emigrants in an obscure hollow
had succumbed from injuries; but," added the editor, with a fine touch
of Western humor, "whether this was the result of his being forcibly
mixed up with his own tanglefoot whiskey or not, we are unable to
determine from the evidence before us." For all that, a small stone
shaft was added later to the rocks near the site of the old mill,
inscribed to the memory of this obscure proprietor, with the singular
legend: "Have ye faith like to him?" And those who knew only of the
material catastrophe looking around upon the scene of desolation it
commemorated, thought grimly that it must be faith indeed, and--were
wiser than they knew.
"You smiled, Don Preble," said the Lady Superior to Key a few weeks
later, "when I told to you that many caballeros thought it most
discreet to intrust their future brides to the maternal guardianship
and training of the Holy Church; yet, of a truth, I meant not YOU. And
yet--eh! well, we shall see."
