The lawyer sprang from his chair. "Good God!" he exclaimed. "How can a man like that ever have been a scoundrel?"
The sheriff relit his dead cigar reflectively. "It's a curious thing," he said. "They are saying on the street that he's sent Prendergast packing. He'll have to watch out--the old tarantula will sting him if he can!"
Harry Sanderson went back to his cabin with a strange feeling of exaltation and disappointment--exaltation at the recurrence of something of his old adventures, disappointment at the flushed silence with which Jessica had received the child.
Jessica bore back from the town that afternoon a spirit of tremulous gladness. In the few moments of that thrilling ride and rescue, a mysterious change had been wrought in her.
In the past days her soul had been possessed by a painful agitation which she did not attempt to analyze. At moments the ingrained hatred of Hugh's act, the resentment that had been the result of that year of pain, had risen to battle for the inherent justice of things. At such times she was restless and _distraite_, sitting much alone, and puzzling David Stires by meaningless responses.
She could not tell him that the son whose name he never took upon his lips was so near: that he whose crime his father's pride of name had hidden, through all the months since then, had gone down with the current, shunned by honest folk, adding to his one dismal act the weight of persistent repetition! She could not tell him this, even though that son now lived without memory of the evil he had done; though he struggled under a cloud of hatred, reaching out to clean deed and high resolve.
Now, however, all distrust and trepidation had vanished. Strangely and suddenly the complex warfare in her mind had stilled. Standing with Mrs. Halloran, she had listened to the comment with shining eyes. Not that she distinguished any sudden and violent _volte-face_ of opinion to turn persecution to popularity and make the reprobate of to-day the favorite of to-morrow. But in its very reserve she instinctively felt a new tension of respect. Suspicion and dislike aside, there was none there who would again hinder the man who had made that race with death!
For her own part, she only knew that she had no longer fear of soul or sense of irrevocable loss, or suffering. What were those old Bible words about being born again? What was that rebirth but a divine forgetting, a wiping out, a "remembering no more?" If it was the memory of his shame that had dragged him down, that memory was gone, perhaps for ever. The Hugh she now loved was not the Hugh who had sinned!