id Marthy.

Seabeck returned after awhile, and Billy Louise, who was watching from
the doorway, met him at the little gate as he was coming up to the
house.

"Well, how bad is it, Mr. Seabeck?" she asked sharply, just because she
felt the imperative need of facts--she who had struggled so long in the
quicksands of suspicion and doubts and fears and suspense.

"Hmm-mm--how bad is it--in the house?" he countered. "The real crime
has been committed there, it seems to me. A few head of cattle, more
or less, don't count for much against the broken heart of an old woman."

"Oh!" Billy Louise, her hands clenched upon the gate, stared up
wide-eyed into his face. And this was the real Seabeck, whom she had
known impersonally all her life! This was the real man of him, whom
she had never known; a flawless diamond of a soul behind those bright
blue eyes and that pointed, graying beard; poet, philosopher, gentleman
to the bone. "Oh! You saw that, too! And they're your cattle that
were stolen! You saw it--oh, you're--you're--"

"Hmm-mm--a human being, I hope, Miss MacDonald, as well as a mere
cattleman. How is the old lady?"

"Crying," said Billy Louise, with brief directness. "Crying over the
picture of that--swine. Think of his running off and leaving her here
all alone--and not even doing the chores first!" (Here, you must know,
was broken an unwritten law of the ranch.) "And Marthy's got
rheumatism, too, so she can hardly walk--"

"I'll attend to the chores, Miss MacDonald." Seabeck's lips quirked
under the fingers that pulled at his whiskers. "You say--over his
picture?"

"Yes, over his picture!" Billy Louise spoke with a suppressed fury.
"With that honest look in his eyes--oh, I could kill him!"

"Hmm-mm--it does seem a pity that one can't. But if she can cry--"

"I see. You believe too that tears are a necessary kind of weakness
for a woman, like smoking tobacco is for a man--or swearing. Well, I
can just tell you, Mr. Seabeck, that some tears pull the very soul out
of a person; they're the red-hot pinchers of the torture-chamber of
life, Mr. Seabeck. Every single, slow tear that Marthy sheds right now
is taking that much away from her life. Why, she--she idolized
that--that devil. She hadn't much that was lovable in poor old Jase;
he was just her husband; he wasn't even a real man. And she never had
any children to love, except a little girl that died. And she's worked
here and scrimped a