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Until it's good an' light I'm going to watch from that clump of timber up there. In half an hour it'll be dawn." He moved toward the timber, and Aldous set about building a fire. He was careful not to awaken Joanne. The fire was crackling cheerily when he went to the lake for water. Returning he saw the faint glow of candlelight in Joanne's tepee.
Joanne's good-night kiss was still warm on his lips, the loving touch of her hands still trembled on his face, and the sweet perfume of her hair was in his nostrils.
To John Aldous the sound of it might have been a thousand miles away. He did not hear. His eye saw nothing in the blackness. For a few moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything. If they found Joanne's husband alive at Tête Jaune what then?
Once or twice he saw in Joanne's clear eyes a look which made him suspect that she had guessed very near to the truth. MacDonald was prompt to the minute. Gray day, with its bars of golden tint, was just creeping over the shoulders of the eastern mountains when he rode up to the Blacktons'. The old hunter was standing close to the horse which Joanne was to ride when Aldous brought her out.
Aldous saw no more then. He was not fighting for his life, but for her, and he fought with the mad ferocity of a tiger. As he struck, and choked, and beat the head of his assailant on the rock, he heard shriek after shriek come from Joanne's lips; and then for a flash he saw them again, and Joanne was struggling in the arms of Quade!
Joanne's breath was coming brokenly through her lips. Unconsciously she had clasped her fingers about the hand Aldous rested on her pommel. "How long he remained in the cave with his dead, MacDonald has never been able to say," he resumed. "He doesn't know whether he buried his wife or left her lying on the sand floor of the cave. He doesn't know how he got out of the mountains.
"I dropped them when the horses went through the rapids." The oppressive and crushing effect of Joanne's first mention of a husband was gone. He made no effort to explain or analyze the two sudden changes that swept over him. He accepted them as facts, and that was all.
"Indeed they are," emphasized Peggy Blackton, whom her husband had given a quick look and a quicker nudge, "They're dreadful!" Looking straight into Joanne's eyes, Aldous guessed that she did not believe, and scarcely heard, the Blacktons. "I had a presentiment something was going to happen," she said, smiling at him. "I'm glad it was no worse than that."
Now that the first shock was over, he did not feel that he had lost Joanne, or that there was a very great danger of losing her. For a moment it occurred to him that he might turn the law upon Culver Rann, and in the same breath he laughed at this absurdity. The law could not help him. He alone could work out his own and Joanne's salvation.
When they came at last to Blackton's bungalow he thought that he had kept this thing from her, and he did not see and would not have understood if he had seen the wonderful and mysterious glow in Joanne's eyes when she kissed Peggy Blackton. Blackton had come in from the work-end, dust-covered and jubilant.
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