"Oh, do you understand, Gail?" he whispered doubtfully. "Can you--without knowing?"

He had her hands in both his and strained forward, his face close to hers. The small, firm fingers clutched his hardened ones almost desperately and the blue eyes, so wide now, looking at him so earnestly, were filmed with tears.

"I think I've understood all along," she said, keeping her voice even at the cost of great effort. "I don't know it all--the detail, I mean.

I don't need to. I know you've been fighting, VB, n.o.bly, bravely. I know--"

He rose to his feet and drew her up with him, pulling her close to him, closer and closer. One arm slipped down over her shoulders, uncertainly, almost timidly. His face bent toward hers, slowly, tenderly, and she lifted her lips to meet it. It was the great moment of his life. Words were out of place; they would have been puerile, disturbing sounds, a mockery instead of an agency to convey an idea of the strength of his emotions. He could feel her breath on his cheek, and for an instant he hung above her, delaying the kiss, trembling with the tremendous pa.s.sion within him.

And then he backed away from her--awkwardly, threatening to fall, a limp hand raised toward the girl as though to warn her off.

"Oh, Gail, forgive me!" he moaned. "Not yet! Great G.o.d, Gail, I'm not worthy!"

His hoa.r.s.e voice mounted and he stood backed against the far wall, fists clenched and stiff arms upraised. She took a faltering step toward him.

"Don't!" she begged. "You are--you--"

But he was gone into the night, banging the door behind him, while the girl leaned against her piano and let the tears come.

He was not worthy! He loved; she knew he loved; she had come to meet that great binding, enveloping emotion willingly, frank with the joy of it, as became her fine nature. Then he had run from her, and for her own sake! All the ordeals he had been through in those last months were as brief, pa.s.sing showers compared with the tempest that raged in him as he rode through the night; and it continued through the hours of light and of darkness for many days. Young VB was a man who feared his own love, and beyond that there can be no greater horror.

He sought solace in the Captain, in driving himself toward the high mark he had set out to attain, but the ideal exemplified in the n.o.ble animal seemed more unattainable than ever and he wondered at times if the victory he sought were not humanly impossible. The knowledge that only by conquering himself could he keep his love for Gail Thorpe unsullied never left him, and beside it a companion haunter stalked through and through his consciousness--the fact that they had declared themselves to each other. He was carrying not alone the responsibility of reclaiming his own life; he must also answer for the happiness of a woman!

In those days came intervals when he wondered if this thing were really love. Might it not be something else--a pa.s.sing hysteria, a reaction from the inner battle? But he knew it was a love stronger than his will, stronger than his great tempter, stronger than the prompting to think of the future when he saw the Thorpe automobile coming up the road that spring day on the first trip the girl had made to the ranch that year. And under the immense truth of the realization he became bodily weak.

Doubt of his strength, too, became more real, more insistent than it had ever been; its hateful power mingled with the thirst, and his heart was rent. What if that love should prove stronger than this discretion which he had retained at such fearful cost, and drag him to her with the stigma he still bore and wreck her!

Gail saw the constraint in him the instant she left the car, and though their handclasp was firm and long and understanding, it sobered her smile.

She tried to start him talking on many things as they sat alone in the log house, but it was useless. He did not respond. So, turning to the subject that had always roused him, that she knew to be so close to his heart, she asked for the Captain.

"In the corral," said VB, almost listlessly. "We'll go out."

So they went together and looked through the gate at the great animal.

The Captain stepped close and stretched his nose for Gail to rub, pushing gently against her hand in response.

"Oh, you n.o.ble thing!" she whispered to him. "When you die, is all that strength of yours to be wasted? Can't it be given to some one else?"

She looked full on VB, then down at the ground, and said: "You've never told me how you broke the Captain. No one in the country knows. They know that he almost killed you; that you fought him a whole week. But no one knows how. Won't--won't you tell me? I want to know, because it was a real achievement--and _yours_."

He met her gaze when it turned upward, and for many heartbeats they stood so, looking at each other. Then VB's eyes wavered and he moved a step, leaning on the bars and staring moodily at the stallion.

"It hurts to think about it," he said. "I don't like to remember. That is why I have never told any one. It hurt him and it hurt me."

She waited through the silence that followed for him to go on.

"I've worked and rubbed it and curried it, and nursed the hair to grow over the place. It looks just like a cinch mark now--like the mark of service. No one would ever notice. But it isn't a mark of labor. _I_ marked the Captain--I had to do it--had to make him understand me. It laid his side open, and all the nursing, all the care I could give wouldn't make up for it. It's there. The Captain knows it; so do I."

She followed his gaze to the little rough spot far down on the sleek side.

"All wild things have to be broken," she said. "None of them ever become tame of their own volition. And in the breaking a mark is invariably left. The memory hurts, but the mark means nothing of itself, once it is healed. Don't you realize that?

"We all bear marks. The marks of our environment, the marks of our friends, the marks of those we--we love. Some of them hurt for a time, but in the end it is all good. Don't you believe that? We see those who are very dear to us suffer, and it marks us; sometimes just loving leaves its mark. But--those are the greatest things in the world.

They're sacred.

"The marks on a woman who goes through fire for a man, say; the marks of a--a mother. They hurt, but in the end they make the bond tighter, more holy."

She waited. Then asked again: "Don't you believe that?"

After a long pause VB answered in a peculiarly bitter voice: "I wish I knew what I believe--if I do believe!"

CHAPTER XVIII

The Lie

VB's eyes burned after Gail as she drove away. He followed the car in its flight until it disappeared over the hump in the road; then continued staring in that direction with eyes that did not see--that merely burned like his throat.

Jed came up the gulch with a load of wood, and VB still stood by the gate.

"I never can get used to these here city ways," he grumbled, "no more'n can these ponies."

VB noticed casually that a tug had been broken and was patched with rope.

"Runaway?" he asked, scarcely conscious of putting the question.

"Oh, Bob Thorpe's girl come drivin' her automobile along fit to ram straight through kingdom come, an' don't turn out till she gets so close I thought we was done for; to be sure, I did. Peter, here, took a jump an' busted a tug." He looked keenly at VB. "Funny!" he remarked.

"She didn't see me, I know. An' she looked as if she'd been cryin'!"

He could not know the added torture those words carried to the heart of the young fellow battling there silently, covering up his agony, trying to appear at ease.

For the thirst had returned with manifold force, augmenting those other agonies which racked him. All former ordeals were forgotten before the fury of this a.s.sault. By the need of stimulant he was subjected to every fiendish whim of singing nerves; from knowing that in him was a love which must be killed to save a woman from sacrifice arose a torment that reached into his very vitals.

The glands of his mouth stopped functioning, and it seemed as though only one thing would take the cursed dryness from his tongue and lips.

His fingers would not be still; they kept plucking and reaching out for that hidden chord which would draw him back to himself, or on down into the depths--somehow, he did not care which. Anything to be out of that killing uncertainty!

As he had gained in strength during those months, so it now seemed had the thirst grown. It battered down his spirit, whipped it to a pulp, and dragged it through the sloughs of doubt and despair. His will--did he have a will? He did not know; nor did he seem to care.

It had come--the slipping backward. He had battled well, but now he could feel himself going, little by little, weakening, fighting outwardly but at heart knowing the futility of it all. And going because of Gail Thorpe! "I can't put this mark on her!" he moaned against the Captain's neck. "She said it--that even those we love must bear the mark. And she said it was all good. She was wrong, wrong! Such a thing can't be good!

"Suppose I did keep above it, was sure of myself for a time in a sham way, wouldn't it only be running the risk of a greater disaster?

Wouldn't it surely come some time? Wouldn't it, if--

"And then it would kill her, too!"

He hammered the Captain's shoulder with his clenched fist and the great stallion snuggled his cheek closer to the man, trying to understand, trying to comfort.