The Lizard’s father started forward and Edwards saw a knife.
A quick leap and Hugh caught up the rifle that the Lizard had placed against the wall. Covering the man with the knife, the visitor said coolly to the woman:
“Not to-night, madam. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he isn’t going to get any one just now.”
He backed to the door and opened it with his face toward them and his weapon ready.
“I will leave this gun at the gate,” he said. “If you are as wise as I think you are, you will not leave this room until you are sure that I am gone.”
He pulled the door shut as he backed across the threshold.
As Hugh Edwards made his way back up the cañon he reflected on what the Lizard had said. One thing was certain, Marta had not started home by the highway. But where was she now? At Saint Jimmy’s? Edwards doubted that the girl would go to her friends after such an experience. Nor did he believe that she would come directly home. He knew too well the sensitive pride that was under all the frank boyishness of her nature. No one was better fitted than he to appreciate the possible effects of the Lizard’s cruelty.
Hugh Edwards knew the dreadful power of humiliation and shame. He knew the burning, withering torture of unexpected and unjust public exposure and of undeserved popular condemnation. He knew the horror and despair of innocence subjected to the unspeakable cruelty of those evil-minded gossips whose one hope is that the venomous news they spread may be true, so that they will not be deprived of their vicious pleasure. Better than any one, Hugh Edwards knew why Marta had not come home after meeting the Lizard.
Like a hunted creature, wounded and spent, this man had come, as so many had come before him, to the Cañada del Oro. He had come to the Cañon of Gold to forget and to be forgotten--and he had found Marta. In the frankness and fearlessness of her innocence, the girl had not known how to keep her love from him. And seeing her love, hungering for that love as a starving man hungers for food, as a soul in torment hungers for peace, he had resolutely forbidden himself to speak the words that would make her his.
When he had first come to the cañon, he had hoped only to find gold enough to secure the bare necessities of life. And when out of their daily companionship his love had come with such distracting power, he had been the more miserable. But when he had heard from the Pardners their story of how they found the girl, he had seen that there was no reason save his own ill-starred past why, if he could win freedom from that past, he might not claim her. That freedom--the freedom from the thing that had driven him to hide in the Cañada del Oro--the freedom to tell her his love, could only be had in the gold for which he toiled in the sand and gravel and rocks beside the cañon creek.