Here was new interest. Though her name was known to few, Jessica had come to be a familiar figure on the streets--she was the only lady rider the place knew--and the description was readily recognizable without the name which Mrs. Halloran supplied. In an hour the story had found a hundred listeners, and as Jessica rode by that day, many a passer-by had turned to gaze after her.
What Prendergast had said Mrs. Halloran told her in a breath. Before she finished she found that Jessica had not heard of the incident in the saloon which had precipitated the fight with Devlin, and with sympathetic rhetoric Mrs. Halloran told this, too.
"He deserved it, ye see, dearie," she finished. "But no less was it a brave thing that--what ye did last night, alone on the mountain with them two, an' countin' yerself as safe as if ye were in God's pocket! To hear that scalawag Prendergast talk, he's been Hugh Stires' good angel--the oily hypocrite! An' do ye think it's true that he's lost his memory--Stires, I mean--an' don't know nothin' that's ever happened with him? Could that be, do ye think?"
"I've often heard of such a thing, Mrs. Halloran," responded Jessica. Her heart was throbbing painfully. "But why does Smoky Mountain hate him so? What has he done?"
Mrs. Halloran shook her head. "I never knew anything myself," she said judiciously. "I reckon the town allus counted him just a general low-down. The rest is only suspicion an' give the dog a bad name."
There had been comfort for Jessica in this interview. The burden of that illness off her mind--she had not realized how great a load this had been till it was lifted--she turned eagerly toward this rift in the cloud of infamy that seemed to envelop the reputation of the man whose life her own had again so strangely touched. She was feeling a new kinship with the town; it was now not alone a spot upon which she had loved to gaze from the height; it was the place wherein the man she had once loved had lived and moved.
Mrs. Halloran's story had materially increased the poignant force of her pity. What had seemed to her a vulgar brawl, had been in reality a courageous and unselfish championship of a defenseless outcast. Thinking of this, the self-blame and contrition which she had felt when she listened to the violin assailed her anew, till she seemed a very part of the guilt, an equal sinner by omission.