"It was no sacrifice for me. All that I had known in the old life was gone. Sneers followed me; the ghosts of money rose up to accuse. I was a felon's daughter; but, worse than that--I was poor! This country held out its arms to me, clean and undefiled. When I got my first sight of it, and the taste of its free air in my nostrils, my heart began to unfold again, and the cramped wrinkles fell out of my tired soul."
The sunshine was around them, and the peace of the open places. They sat for the world to see them, and there was nothing to hide in the sympathy that moved Dr. Slavens to reach out and take the girl's hand. He caressed it with comforting touch, as if to mitigate the suffering of her heart, in tearing from it for his eyes to see, her hoarded sorrow and unearned shame.
"There is that freedom about it," said he, "when one sees it by day and sunlight."
"But it has its nights, too," she shuddered, the shadow of last night in her eyes.
"Yet they all pass--the longest of them and the most painful," he comforted her.
"And leave their scars sometimes. How I came here, registered, drew a claim, and filed on it, you know. I did all that under the name of Horton, which is a family name on mother's side, not thinking what the consequence might be. Now, in payment for this first breach of the law, I must at least give up all my schemes here and retreat. I may be prosecuted; I may even go to prison, like my father did."
"Surely not!" he protested. "Who is there to know it, to lay a charge against you?"
"Such person is not wanting in the miserable plot of my life," she answered. "I will reach him soon in my sorry tale."
"Boyle!" Slavens said, as if thinking aloud. "He's the man!"
"You take the name from my mouth," she told him. "He has threatened me with prosecution. Perjury, he says it would be called, and prison would be the penalty."
"I met Jerry Boyle about five years ago, when father was in Congress. His father was at that time Senator from this state. We lived in Washington, and Jerry Boyle was then considered a very original and delightful young man. He was fresh in from the range, but he had the polish of a university education over his roughness, and what I know now to be inborn coarseness was then accepted for ingenuousness. He passed current in the best society of the capital, where he was coddled as a butterfly of new species. We met; he made love to me, and I--I am afraid that I encouraged him to do it at first.