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Updated: May 4, 2025
Gaynor good-night. She was glad that he was going, and he knew it though she made the obvious perfunctory remark. Gloria saw and came tripping across the room. "Not going so soon?" "Yes," he said briefly. "Good-bye, Gloria." "Good-night, you mean, don't you?" "I mean good-bye," he said quietly. Gratton thrust forward.
Gratton stumbled and sagged, staggering like a drunken man. Brodie, with his rifle-barrel not six feet from Gratton's terror-stricken body, laughed again. "Stop!" Gloria shrilled. She broke away from Jarrold's grasp and ran toward Brodie. "You don't know what you are doing. You " "Close your trap, kid," Brodie thundered at her. "Unless you want the second bullet."
She tore them away, wrenched herself free from him, and started back. As she did so her little silken bundle dropped at her feet. Gratton caught it up and buried his face in it. Now as he looked up at her his eyes and all that she could see of his face were stamped with that which lay in his heart. "Oh!" she cried, shrinking not so much from him as from the thing she read so plainly at last.
And once, in the city, she had been ashamed of him and had turned to Gratton! Because he had appeared to her without just so much black cloth upon his back cut in just such a style! And now how bitterly she was ashamed of her shame. But for only an instant. Thereafter she forgot shame of any sort and exulted in her pride of him and in her pride that she was proud.
She was in a trap. This man had made it, cunningly using in his work all that he knew of Gloria Gaynor. There was no way out, save through the gate of matrimony. And in her heart she laughed at him through that other wider gate beyond, the gate of divorce. She would accept his name; the name of Gratton stood high in San Francisco.
As he sat with Gloria and found little to say, he was conscious of her eyes probing at him when she thought that he did not see. He looked away, a shadow in his eyes, and chanced to see Gratton. Gratton, who had struck him as contemptible in the woods, a misfit and a poor sort of man at best, was here on his own heath.
After the service the padre had a communion service in a corner of the field for those who wished to stay. About twenty men stayed, and the following officers Colonel Best-Dunkley, Allen, Gratton, Giffin and myself. The padre had a miniature oak altar, containing a crucifix, with two lighted candles, on a table.
If there were, in truth, such gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of gold for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening wolves on the trail gold in quantity to make even toughened old gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it why, then, that gold was half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's!
"I beg pardon; sir, but I think Gratton has gone to bed. He had no orders." "Then wake him," said Eldon Parr, "instantly. And send for my secretary." With a glance which he perceived Alison comprehended, Hodder made his way out of the room. He had from Eldon Parr, as he passed him, neither question, acknowledgment, nor recognition.
"We rode on ahead, Jim," Gloria told him, and Jim detected no false note in her gaiety. "Mamma is coming." Spalding gave them a key and they went to the house. It was Gloria who unlocked the door; Gratton, his white face looking more than ever bloodless, saw her hand tremble. She hurried in, excused herself, and ran upstairs.
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