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Updated: June 9, 2025
Under his broad-brimmed black felt hat, which he had not troubled to remove, a handsome face with fierce, domineering eyes and a curved hawk-bill of a nose looked savagely at the pair who sat by the stove. Ettie had jumped to her feet full of confusion and alarm. "I'm glad to see you, Mr. Baldwin," said she. "You're earlier than I had thought. Come and sit down."
"I think, Ettie, that if you were to leave us alone we could get this thing settled," said McMurdo quietly. "Or maybe, Mr. Baldwin, you will take a turn down the street with me. It's a fine evening, and there's some open ground beyond the next block." "I'll get even with you without needing to dirty my hands," said his enemy.
"Well, it may be seven or eight. But within a year at the furthest we will leave the valley behind us." It was the most that Ettie could obtain, and yet it was something. There was this distant light to illuminate the gloom of the immediate future. She returned to her father's house more light-hearted than she had ever been since Jack McMurdo had come into her life.
A number of sheds for stabling and implements, chicken coops and pig pen had accumulated at the back; the corn and buckwheat climbed the mountain; and the truck patch was wide and luxuriant. A narrow strip, bright, in season, with the petunias and cinnamon pinks which Ettie tended, separated the dwelling from the public road; and the flowers more than anything else attracted Hannah's daughter.
In the early hours of the morning a beautiful woman and a much muffled man boarded a special train which had been sent by the railroad company, and made a swift, unbroken journey out of the land of danger. It was the last time that ever either Ettie or her lover set foot in the Valley of Fear. Ten days later they were married in Chicago, with old Jacob Shafter as witness of the wedding.
It may have been that his attentions to Ettie had been more evident than before, or that they had gradually obtruded themselves into the slow mind of his good German host; but, whatever the cause, the boarding-house keeper beckoned the young man into his private room and started on the subject without any circumlocution. "It seems to me, mister," said he, "that you are gettin' set on my Ettie.
"Sure, hard words break no bones." "But they were true." "Well, dear, it's not so bad as you think. We are but poor men that are trying in our own way to get our rights." Ettie threw her arms round her lover's neck. "Give it up, Jack! For my sake, for God's sake, give it up! It was to ask you that I came here to-day. Oh, Jack, see I beg it of you on my bended knees!
From Chicago he was chased, after two attempts so near success that it was sure that the third would get him. From Chicago he went under a changed name to California, and it was there that the light went for a time out of his life when Ettie Edwards died.
"I have told you, have I not, that you are too late? There is another, and if I have not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else." "Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?" The girl sank her face into her hands. "I wish to heaven that you had been first!" she sobbed. McMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant.
Soon it would be evening and the frogs would begin again, the frogs and whippoorwills. The valley, just as Hannah had said, was lonely. He stirred and later found himself some supper in the kitchen where everything was new. On the following morning he left the Greenstream settlement; it was Friday, and Monday he returned with Ettie, his sister.
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