Yet she spoke cheerfully. "It wouldn't be just--just right to go till the trestle's done, Pete, dear."
He looked at her sharply. It was the conviction he had been fighting many a day--that it seemed to be only his own had made it so much harder for him. From the silence he had forced on himself of late he spoke fiercely:
"That damned Pole! We can't let him win. We got to lick them bohunks."
"And Mr. Torrance--after all, Pete, he's only a tenderfoot. . . . Then there's Tressa."
He nodded slowly. "Yes, there's Tressa." A chivalry he would never have acknowledged had been thrusting the girl more and more into the foreground. From the ordinary perils of isolation father and lover might defend her, but in the great calamity that Blue Pete knew was planned to overwhelm her two protectors she would inevitably fall.
"But yuh shudn't have to wait, Mira," he burst out. "An yuh wudn't," he added miserably, "if I wasn't jes' a common rustler."
She came to him with quick steps and ran her fingers through his coarse hair.
"I wasn't no better, Pete--me and my brothers." In her emotion she had dropped back into the old looseness of speech.
He seized her hand in both his own and crushed it to his lips so that it hurt pleasurably.
"I know why yuh stole them horses," he murmured. "Yuh cudn't bear to see the Sergeant thinkin' he loved yuh--an' yuh knew he cudn't love a rustler."
"I guess I knew I was going to love you, Pete."
He wrapped his arms about her and buried his face in her neck; and she could feel him trembling.
"God help me!" he groaned. "I think that's what's holdin' me."
From the moment of his leap through Torrance's window the half breed's mind had been disquieted. At any risk, until he could go to them with clean hands, he would not let the Police know he was still alive. He knew their relentlessness in the chase; and he must be free in order to redeem himself.
That very night, straight from eaves-dropping at the bohunks' meeting, he had crept back to Torrance's stable and found it locked. The padlock in itself was nothing, but it implied suspicion--possibly entangling precautions. And so he had slunk away.
A night's reflection had warned him how fortunate was the instinct that held his hand. As Mira lay sleeping heavily beside him on their bed of spruce, he had lived again the happy days of his unofficial Police duties with Sergeant Mahon--on the prairie, at the barracks and the Police post, but more vividly than all, in the fastnesses of the Cypress Hills. He saw once more the kindly eye, felt the friendly hand, heard the soft voice of the one man above his class who had treated him as equal and friend. He saw again the old tobacco pouch spilled on Inspector Barker's desk in the barracks at Medicine Hat.