You've got ahead of 'em both, and had your revenge by going off with the gal.That's what I said all along.When folks--especially women folks--wondered how you could leave a woman like your wife, and go off with a scallawag like that gal, I allers said they'd find out there was a reason.And when your wife came flaunting down here with Poindexter before she'd quite got quit of you, I reckon they began to see the whole little game.No sir! Iknew it wasn't on account of the gal! Why, when you came here to-night and told me quite nat'ral-like and easy how she went off in the ship, and then calmly ate your pie and drank your whiskey after it, I knew you didn't care for her.There's my hand, Spence;you're a trump, even if you are a little looney, eh? Why, what's up?"Shallow and selfish as Tucker was, Patterson's words seemed like a revelation that shocked him as profoundly as it might have shocked a nobler nature.The simple vanity and selfishness that made him unable to conceive any higher reason for his wife's loyalty than his own personal popularity and success, now that he no longer possessed that eclat, made him equally capable of the lowest suspicions.He was a dishonored fugitive, broken in fortune and reputation--why should she not desert him! He had been unfaithful to her from wildness, from caprice, from the effect of those fascinating qualities; it seemed to him natural that she should be disloyal from more deliberate motives, and he hugged himself with that belief.Yet there was enough doubt, enough of haunting suspicion that he had lost or alienated a powerful affection, to make him thoroughly miserable.He returned his friend's grasp convulsively and buried his face upon his shoulder.But he was not above feeling a certain exultation in the effect of his misery upon the dog-like, unreasoning affection of Patterson, nor could he entirely refrain from slightly posing his affliction before that sympathetic but melancholy man.Suddenly he raised his head, drew back, and thrust his hand into his bosom with a theatrical gesture.
"What's to keep me from killing Poindexter in his tracks?" he said wildly.
"Nothin' but HIS shooting first," returned Patterson, with dismal practicality."He's mighty quick, like all them army men.It's about even, I reckon, that he don't get ME first," he added in an ominous voice.
"No!" returned Tucker, grasping his hand again."This is not your affair, Patterson; leave him to me when I come back.""If he ever gets the drop on me, I reckon he won't wait," continued Patterson lugubriously."He seems to object to my passin'
criticism on your wife, as if she was a queen or an angel."The blood came to Spencer's cheek, and he turned uneasily to the window."It's dark enough now for a start," he said hurriedly, "and if I could get across the mountain without lying over at the summit, it would be a day gained."Patterson arose without a word, filled a flask of spirit, handed it to his friend, and silently led the way through the slowly falling rain and the now settled darkness.The mustang was quickly secured and saddled, a heavy poncho afforded Tucker a disguise as well as a protection from the rain.With a few hurried, disconnected words, and an abstracted air, he once more shook his friend's hand and issued cautiously from the corral.When out of earshot from the house he put spurs to the mustang, and dashed into a gallop.
To intersect the mountain road he was obliged to traverse part of the highway his wife had walked that afternoon, and to pass within a mile of the casa where she was.Long before he reached that point his eyes were straining the darkness in that direction for some indication of the house which was to him familiar.Becoming now accustomed to the even obscurity, less trying to the vision than the alternate light and shadow of cloud or the full glare of the moonlight, he fancied he could distinguish its low walls over the monotonous level.One of those impulses which had so often taken the place of resolution in his character suddenly possessed him to diverge from his course and approach the house.Why, he could not have explained.It was not from any feeling of jealous suspicion or contemplated revenge--that had passed with the presence of Patterson; it was not from any vague lingering sentiment for the woman he had wronged--he would have shrunk from meeting her at that moment.But it was full of these and more possibilities by which he might or might not be guided, and was at least a movement towards some vague end, and a distraction from certain thoughts he dared not entertain and could not entirely dismiss.Inconceivable and inexplicable to human reason, it might have been acceptable to the Divine omniscience for its predestined result.
He left the road at a point where the marsh encroached upon the meadow, familiar to him already as near the spot where he had embarked from the Chinaman's boat the day before.He remembered that the walls of the hacienda were distinctly visible from the tules where he had hidden all day, and he now knew that the figures he had observed near the building, which had deterred his first attempts at landing, must have been his wife and his friend.He knew that a long tongue of the slough filled by the rising tide followed the marsh, and lay between him and the hacienda.The sinking of his horse's hoofs in the spongy soil determined its proximity, and he made a detour to the right to avoid it.In doing so, a light suddenly rose above the distant horizon ahead of him, trembled faintly, and then burned with a steady lustre.It was a light at the hacienda.Guiding his horse half abstractedly in this direction, his progress was presently checked by the splashing of the animal's hoofs in the water.But the turf below was firm, and a salt drop that had spattered to his lips told him that it was only the encroaching of the tide in the meadow.With his eyes on the light, he again urged his horse forward.The rain lulled, the clouds began to break, the landscape alternately lightened and grew dark; the outlines of the crumbling hacienda walls that enshrined the light grew more visible.A strange and dreamy resemblance to the long blue-grass plain before his wife's paternal house, as seen by him during his evening rides to courtship, pressed itself upon him.He remembered, too, that she used to put a light in the window to indicate her presence.Following this retrospect, the moon came boldly out, sparkled upon the overflow of silver at his feet, seemed to show the dark, opaque meadow beyond for a moment, and then disappeared.It was dark now, but the lesser earthly star still shone before him as a guide, and pushing towards it, he passed in the all-embracing shadow.
