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Updated: June 23, 2025
After their brief honeymoon the young people had returned to the village. The understanding was that Eve should again take up her business, while Will continued his season up in the hills, hunting with his traps and gun. He was to visit Barnriff at intervals during the season, and finally return and stay with Eve during the months when the furs he might take would be unfit for the market.
He was a branded man before, but now, so long as he remained in Barnriff, or wherever he met a man who had lived in Barnriff at this time, so long as Will escaped capture, the pointing finger would be able to mark honest Jim Thorpe as a cattle-thief. He was powerless to do more than deny it. The horror of it was dreadful. He had done it for her. And her woman's heart told her why.
One need say no more, except that they were, in the main, weatherproof. But wait. There was one little house that had a verandah and creepers growing around it. It was well painted, too, and stood out amongst its frowzy neighbors a thing approaching beauty. But Barnriff, as a residential hamlet, was hardly worth considering seriously.
Peter's great shoulders shrugged. "Why, nothing," he said. "It kind of seemed a natural question." The tone brought immediate contrition to the girl's warm heart. This man was always kind to her. It would have been difficult to remember a single week since she had lived in Barnriff which had not witnessed at least one small kindness from him. Her eyes wandered over her garden.
Later in the day he left for the hills, and from that moment an entire change came over Eve's whole life. The month following Will's departure from the village saw stirring times for the citizens of Barnriff. The exploding of Dan McLagan's bombshell in their midst was only the beginning; a mere herald of what was to follow.
He had been helped to escape their justice. So there was no employment of any sort in Barnriff for Jim Thorpe. And Eve, too, was only completing orders which had been placed with her weeks before. "There," she said, raising her needle and removing the stuff from beneath it. "I hate it, and I'm glad it's done." She looked up with a smile to encounter the dark eyes of Jim Thorpe.
That is to say, it was scandal that passed surreptitiously from lip to lip, and was rarely spoken where more than two people foregathered. For small as Barnriff was, ignorant as were the majority of its people, scandal was generally tabooed, and it was only in bad cases where it was allowed to riot. The reason of this restraint was simple enough.
Gay nodded, and proceeded to support him. "Y'see, most of our leddies has got higher than 'cordions an' sech things. Though I 'lows a concertina takes a beatin'. Still, education has got loose on Barnriff, an' I heerd tell as ther's some o' the folks yearnin' fer piannys. I did hear one of our leadin' citizens, Mr. Anthony Smallbones, was about to finance a brass band layout."
He was well educated, traveled, and possessed an inexhaustible fund of information on any subject. But beyond the fact that he had once been a soldier, and that a large slice of his life had been lived in such places as Barnriff, no one knew aught of him. And yet it was probable that nobody on the Western prairies was better known than Peter Blunt.
But then, had he known it, it might have altered the whole complexion of the events which happened in Barnriff that night. He did not know it, so he rode straight on to Eve's house. Nor did it occur to him as strange, at that hour in the evening, that he did not encounter a single soul on his way. Arrived at her gate he dismounted and off-saddled.
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