dfully with
blood." The weak, slight body shuddered in his embrace. "She said our
wickedness had brought her death, but that she would plead for us in
Heaven."

"She is not dead, my beloved; I heard of her before we left Cape Colony.
She has taken the veil. She is well, and will be happy in her religion, as
those good women always are."

"I was not one of those good women, Richard----"

He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently:

"You might have been happy--with her--if I had never come between you!"

He found some words to tell her that these things were meant to be. From
the beginning ...

"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and
leave you, Richard?"

He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying
whisper fluttered at his lips:

"You cannot! Think!--the child!"

He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang,
remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss
it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes
rolled up, and she died.

He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she
could not have borne to have him leave her.

The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him
praying--a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.

But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at
openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up
waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester
repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.

"_Our Father Who art in Heaven...._"

He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the
burning blue vault of ether Who heard ... and yet, for her sake,
supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even
now....

_"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come...."_

And if it came, should those have any part in it who had lived together
unwed in open sin?

_"Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven...."_

The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will that left him
desolate and laid her away, a still fair, fast-corrupting thing, under the
red earth and the great ironstone boulders!

_"Give us this day our daily bread...."_

Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the daily bread of
life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many base, sordid, lovel