story it had never gossiped so much as it had done since
the Mazarines had come.

From the first the vast majority of folk had sided with Louise and
denounced Mazarine. They knew well she had married too young to be
self-seeking or intriguing; and, in any case, no woman in Askatoon or
yet in the West, could have conceived of a girl marrying "the ancient
one from the jungle," as Burlingame had called him.

Burlingame could never have been on the side of the Ten Commandments
himself, even with a sure and certain hope of happiness on earth, and in
Heaven also, guaranteed to him. Nothing could have condemned Mazarine so
utterly as the coalition between the "holy good people," as Burlingame
called them, and himself; and between the holy good people and himself
were many who in their secret hearts would never have shunned Louise if,
after the night on the prairie with Orlando, release had been found
for her in the Divorce Court. Jonas Billings had put the matter in a
nutshell when he said:

"It ain't natural, them two, at Tralee. For marrying her he ought to be
tarred and feathered, and for the way he treats her he ought to be let
loose in the ha'nts of the grizzlies. What he done to that girl is a
crime ag'in' the law. If there was any real spunk in the Methodists,
they'd spit him out like pus."

That was exactly what the Methodist body had decided to do on the very
day that Louise had fled from Tralee and the old man pursued her in
the wrong direction. The Methodist body had determined to discipline
Mazarine, to eject him from their communion, because he had raised a
whip against his wife; because he had maltreated Li Choo; and because he
had used language unbecoming a Christian. They had decided that Mazarine
had not shown the righteous anger of a Christian man, but of one who had
backslided, and who, in the words of Rigby the chemist, "Must be spewed
out of the mouth of the righteous into the dust of shame."

That was the situation when Joel Mazarine drove furiously into the town
and made for the railway station. Men like Jonas Billings, who saw him,
and had the scent for sensation, passed the word on downtown, as it is
called, that something "was up" with Mazarine, and the railway station
was the place where what was up could be seen. Therefore; a quarter of
an hour before the arrival of the express which was to carry Orlando
Guise's mother to her sick sister three hundred miles down the line,
a goodly number of cit