found horses tied to saplings in a small cove close to the river. The party mounted and rode into the hills. Except for the ring of the horses’ hoofs there was no sound for miles. ’Lindy was the first to speak.
“Ain’t this Quicksand Creek?” she asked of her lover as they forded a stream.
He nodded. “The sands are right below us—not more’n seven or eight steps down here Cal Henson was sucked under.”
After another stretch ridden in silence they turned up a little cove to a light shining in a cabin window. The brothers alighted and Dave helped the girl down. He pushed open the door and led the way inside.
A man sat by the fireside with his feet on the table. He was reading a newspaper. A jug of whiskey and a glass were within reach of his hand. Without troubling to remove his boots from the table, he looked up with a leer at the trembling girl.
Dave spoke at once. “We’ll git it over with. The sooner the quicker.”
’Lindy’s heart was drenched with dread. She shrank from the three pairs of eyes focused upon her as if they had belonged to wolves. She had hoped that the preacher might prove a benevolent old man, but this man with the heavy thatch of unkempt, red hair and furtive eyes set askew offered no comfort. If there had been a single friend of her family present, if there had been any woman at all! If she could even be sure of the man she was about to marry!
It seemed to her that the preacher was sneering when he put the questions to which she answered quaveringly. Vaguely she felt the presence of some cruel, sinister jest of which she was the sport.
After the ceremony had been finished the three men drank together while she sat white-faced before the fire. When at last Ranse Roush and the red-headed preacher left the cabin, both of them were under the influence of liquor. Dave had drunk freely himself.
’Lindy would have given her hopes of heaven to be back safely in the little mud-daubed bedroom she had called her own.
Three days later ’Lindy wakened to find a broad ribbon of sunshine across the floor of the cabin. Her husband had not come home at all the night before. She shivered with self-pity and dressed slowly. Already she knew that her life had gone to wreck, that it would be impossible to live with Dave Roush and hold her self-respect.
But she had cut herself off from retreat. All of her friends belonged to the Clanton faction and they would not want to have anything to do with her. She had no home now but this, no refuge against the neglect and insults of this man with whom she had elected to go through life. To her mind came the verdict of old Nance Cunningham on the imprudent marriage of another girl: “ ’Randy’s done made her bed; I reckon she’s got to lie on it.”
A voice hailed the cabin from outside. She went to the door. Ranse Roush and the red-haired preacher had ridden into the clearing and were dismounting. They had with them a led horse.
“Fix up some breakfast,” ordered Ranse.
The young wife flushed. She resented his tone and his manner. Like Dave, he too assumed that she had come to be a drudge for the whole drunken clan, a creature to be sneered at and despised.
Silently she cooked a meal for the men. The girl was past tears. She had wept herself out.
While they ate the men told of her father’s fury when he had discovered the elopement, of how he had gone down to the mill and cast her off with a father’s curse, renouncing all relationship with her forever. It was a jest that held for them a great savor. They made sport of him and of the other Clantons till she could keep still no longer.
“I won’t stand this! I don’t have to! Where’s Dave?” she demanded, eyes flashing with contempt and anger.
Ranse grinned, then turned to his companion with simulated perplexity. “Where is Dave, Brother Hugh?”
“Damfino,” replied the red-headed man, and the girl could see that he was gloating over her. “Last night he was at a dance on God-Forgotten Crick. Dave’s soft on a widow up there, you know.”
The color ebbed from the face of the wife. One of her hands clutched at the back of a chair till the knuckles stood out white and bloodless. Her eyes fastened with a growing horror upon those of the red-headed man. She had come to the edge of an awful discovery.
“You’re no preacher. Who are you?”
“Me?” His smile was cruel as death. “You done guessed it, sister. I’m Hugh Roush—Dave’s brother.”
“An’—an’—my marriage was all a lie?”
“Did ye think Dave Roush would marry a Clanton? He’s a bad lot, Dave is, but he ain’t come that low yet.”
For the first and last time in her life ’Lindy fainted.
Presently she floated back to consciousness and the despair of a soul mortally stricken. She saw it all now. The lies of Dave Roush had enticed her into a trap. He had been working for revenge against the family he hated, especially against brave old Clay Clanton who had killed two of his kin within the year. With the craft inherited from savage ancestors he had sent a wound more deadly than any rifle bullet could carry. The Clantons were proud folks, and he had dragged their pride in the mud.
If the two brothers expected her to make a scene, they were disappointed. Numb with the shock of the blow, she made no outcry and no reproach.
“Git a move on ye, gal,” ordered Ranse after he had finished eating. “You’re goin’ with us, so you better hurry.”
“What are you goin’ to do with me?” she asked dully.
“Why, Dave don’t want you any more. We’re goin’ to send you home.”
“I reckon yore folks will kill the fatted calf for you,” jeered Hugh Roush. “They tell me you always been mighty high-heeled, ’Lindy Clanton. Mebbe you won’t hold yore head so high now.”
The girl rode between them down from the hills. Who knows into what an agony of fear and remorse and black despair she fell? She could not go home a cast-off, a soiled creature to be scorned and pointed at. She dared not meet her father. It would be impossible to look her little brother Jimmie in the face. Would they believe the story she told? And if they were convinced of its truth, what difference would that make? She was what she was, no matter how she had become so.
On the pike they met old Nance Cunningham returning from the mill with a sack of meal. The story of that meeting was one the old gossip told after the tragedy to many an eager circle of listeners.
“She jes’ lifted her han’ an’ stopped me, an’ if death was ever writ on a human face it shorely wuz stomped on hers. ‘I want you to tell my father I’m sorry,’ she sez. ‘He swore he’d marry me inside of an hour. This man hyer—his brother—made out like he wuz a preacher an’ married us. Tell my father that an’ ask him to forgive me if he can.’ That wuz all she said. Ranse Roush hit her horse with a switch an’ sez, ‘Yo’ kin tell him all that yore own self soon as you git home.’ I reckon I wuz the lastest person she spoke to alive.”
They left the old woman staring after them with her mouth open. It could have been only a few minutes later that they reached Quicksand Creek.
’Lindy pulled up her horse to let the men precede her through the ford. They splashed into the shallows on the other side of the creek and waited for her to join them. Instead, she slipped from the saddle, ran down the bank, and plunged into the quicksand.
“Goddlemighty!” shrieked Ranse. “She’s a-drowndin’ herself in the sands.”
They spurred their horses back across the creek and ran to rescue the girl. But she had flung herself forward face down far out of their reach. They dared not venture into the quivering bog after her. While they still stared in a frozen horror, the tragedy was completed. The victim of their revenge had disappeared beneath the surface of the morass.
CHAPTER I