A child has an instinctive fear of the dark; the thing a man does not understand brings from the obscurity of the unknown a certain, vague dread. Who had written this thing? There was no answer. Why? No answer. How did it come here, who could have known that Hume would see it here? No answer. It was as though a warning, taking form from the invisible air had fallen from the air before his startled eyes.

He swept up the paper, crumpling it in his fingers. He had not heard Helga Strawn, did not know that she was in the room until she spoke quietly.

"Is fate relenting? Or are you still playing the losing game?"

He swung upon her sharply. His eyes, glittering and hard, met hers softly luminous. He had never seen the woman so radiantly, regally beautiful, perhaps because he had never seen her so keenly alive as she was to-day. Although his brain was riotous with other things he could not fail to note the superb carriage, the rich gown daringly fashionable, the warm whiteness of arms and throat, the finely chiselled red lips that were unsmiling.

"The losing game?" he cried, coming swiftly toward her, stopping only when his tall form towered over her. "By G.o.d, no! I have lost a trick here, a trick there. A man counts upon that sort of thing. That little shrimp Conway is scared of his life and is for pulling out. I'm glad of it. He'll sell to me before he'll go to Shandon. Let Leland pull out, too. We'll take him over. I'm going to win, I tell you, Claire Hazleton! We're going to win, you and I. Win big!"

There was no change in her cool eyes. She swept by him, not turning out an inch to pa.s.s, her skirts brushing him, and dropped idly into her chair. He followed, and stood over her again.

"Shandon is going to be acquitted," she said. "You know that. He'll be set free in ten days. Then what?"

"Then we'll take him in with us. We'll get the water and that's all we want any way you put it. Inside six months we'll be subdividing and getting our money back."

She laughed.

"So you think that Shandon will jump at the chance to go into any sort of partnership with you?"

"We'll make him," crisply. "He has retained Brisbane, the biggest, highest priced criminal lawyer this side the Rockies. He has cleared up his mortgage but he's had to mortgage again to do it. He's in debt up to his eyes. We'll make him a proposition that will show him the way to clear himself. I tell you, Claire, he'll have to do it."

"You say _we_," she reminded him, lifting her white shoulders.

"And I mean you and I," he returned bluntly. "I've come here to do some straight talking." There leaped up into his eyes a light she had never seen there until now, a quick colour ran into his cheeks. "I want you to marry me, Claire."

Perhaps the woman's pulse quickened. Certainly no change in her expression, no quiver of a muscle, no deepened breathing told that a supreme moment had come into her life, a moment she had long and unceasingly striven for.

"Do you?" she asked indifferently. "Why?"

"Because," he cried, "you are like no other woman in all the world.

Because the things that I want are the things that you want. Because we should be a man and a woman, mated, to take our places in the world and hold them. Where there is man's work I can do it; where there is woman's work you can do it. We are young; in ten years' time we can rise to whatever we care to set our eyes upon. Why do I want you?

Just because in brain and in body you are the woman in the world fitted to occupy the place that shall be my wife's."

"Other men have asked me to marry them," she said coolly. "I think that all of them have said something about love."

"And I love you," he told her. "A man cannot come to care for a woman without her knowing it. I don't come to you bleating about a breaking heart, because you are no fool and I am no fool. If you were the kind to care about a lot of sentimental rot you wouldn't be the woman you are, you wouldn't be the woman I'd want. I'd be good to you. I'd give you the power that a beautiful woman with a strong, rich husband can come to have in San Francisco, in New York, in London if you like.

When I rise you'll rise with me. I'll have men know that my wife shall have the place, above the heads of their wives, that she wants. And I'll be proud of you!"

Then he got his answer as seldom a woman has answered a man. She lifted her eyes to his, she put back her head with the tossing regal gesture he knew so well, her lips parted slowly--and she laughed.

Laughed at him in a sudden mirth of leaping scorn, that was hard and cruel, that mocked and sneered at him, that took supreme toll of the supreme moment. Laughed as she saw the light quiver and die in his eyes, as the colour faded from his cheeks and ran back red.

"Love me!" she cried scornfully. "You'd be proud of me! Why? When you answered you forgot to tell the truth, Mr. Hume. Because you need me, because you are beaten now and must come hiding a whimper under big words, come to a woman who holds you so in the hollow of her hand that she can break you so utterly that your own overweening conceit cannot find the fragments with the microscope of a distorted vanity! Love me as you'd love any other fine thing just because it was yours. Because you'd use me, because you see that such a wife as I could be would be but a stone for you to stand on to climb up a little higher. And you think that of all men in the world I should choose a man like _you_ for husband?"

She jeered openly at him, disdaining to see the red anger flaring in his eyes. She remembered the reason that had brought her to him in the beginning and a savage gladness in her rejoiced at finding the victory all that she had yearned for. Her dominant blood was seething to the surface. And it was Hume blood.

"Listen to me a minute," she cried sharply as he was about to speak.

"You've come for straight talk to-day, you say. Let us have it then.

You have gone your way boastfully, arrogantly, unscrupulously and it has been the fool's way. You are playing the losing game and it isn't even in you to lose like a man. You have stared at the glitter of gold so long that you have gone blind looking at it. Your own infallibility has loomed so large before you that you have lost your sanity. I say listen to me!" her voice ringing with its command. "I am going to tell you something. I am going to tell you why I came to you, why I suffered you day after day to come to me. And what I came for I am going to get. You are going to give it to me!"

She had sprung to her feet, twin spots of colour upon her white cheeks, her eyes blazing.

"You told me that you had paid five thousand dollars to Helga Strawn for her interest in the Dry Lands! Liar! You paid her twenty-five thousand!"

"Well?" he snarled harshly. "What of it?"

"You laughed about it. You said that she was a fool like most women.

Like all women, was what you thought! And women were made just for you to tread upon and sneer at. You did not know that I knew a great deal more about Helga Strawn than you ever guessed!"

"You--know--Helga--Strawn!"

The words beat at her like stinging, separate blows. And now it had come into his eyes, the thing that had never been there, the thing that would never die out of the man's soul while life clung to him,--fear.

"I know you, to the last spot you think you've covered up," she ran on swiftly. "So well that I know I am about to stir you into one of your mad fits of rage. And I am not afraid to do it. You'd kill me if you dared, but you won't dare. For after all I think that in your braggadocio way you are a coward, Sledge Hume."

"You cat!" he flung at her with an attempt at his old manner.

"I have two men working out yonder," she said coolly. "If I called to them--" She shrugged her shoulders. "I want to tell you all that you are hungering to know even while you are afraid to hear it. Helga Strawn got your check for five thousand dollars. She got, also, a Wells Fargo order from Sacramento for twenty thousand. Sent by a fict.i.tious Arnold Wentworth. Ah!"

For he had cried out sharply, his face was dead white, his eyes were filled with horror. His premonition had come.

"Who committed the crime you charged Wayne Shandon with?" she demanded fearlessly. "Who killed Arthur Shandon and robbed him of twenty-five thousand dollars? If Helga Strawn came into court and told all that she knows do you realise what a jury would say about it?"

"The things you are saying are lies," he cried back at her, driving his hands into his pockets that she might not see that they were shaking.

He stared after her in wonder as she went swiftly to the table and unlocked a drawer. He wondered more as she s.n.a.t.c.hed out a folded paper and brought it to him.

"Sign that," she said curtly. "Get it witnessed before a notary and send it to me and Helga Strawn will forget what she knows."

A glance showed him the significance of the doc.u.ment. It was a deed, properly drawn, needing but his own signature to return to Helga Strawn the lands he had bought from her.

"So," he sneered, "you are trying a little blackmail, are you? You are a spy and Helga Strawn's agent, I suppose?"

Again she laughed at him.

"I attend to my own business, my dear cousin," her voice very like his.

"If you hadn't been a fool you'd have known that I was Helga Strawn six months ago. Blackmail? Call it what you like. It is your one chance to save your neck. I know that in one of your mad fits of anger you killed Arthur Shandon. I know that you took his money. And I am not the only one in the country who knows or suspects it. Your chance is slim enough as it is, Mr. Hume. Don't make it worse."

Blow after blow until the man set his muscles like iron to keep his body from shaking as his soul shook. This was the greatest shock of all because it struck at the keynote of his nature, this knowledge that a woman had tricked him, that she had played with him, that now she held him as she said so bluntly, in the hollow of her hand.

"You traitress!" he cried hoa.r.s.ely. "You miserable traitress!"

And Helga Strawn laughed.

"It will take you a couple of hours to ride into El Toyon," she said.

"That will give you time to think it over. If you decide to sign the deed and send it to me to-night I'll do my part. If I don't get the deed to-night I'll go into town in the morning for a talk with the district attorney. I think I've got you where I want you, Mr. Hume."

The things which Hume said to her she accepted indifferently. She had never known that a man could find such words to utter to a woman. When she has listened long enough she turned and went out of the room, going upstairs and standing by her window where she could see him as he went out. As she saw him striding down the walk toward his horse, jamming the deed into his pocket as he went, her eyes suddenly grew wet, and she stamped her foot angrily.

"Of all men living I hate you most!" she cried pa.s.sionately. And then, softly, more softly than any one had ever heard her speak, "And you come closer to being a man than any man I ever knew. I wonder--"