xert himself as he would, the
color would not return to his pallid lips, and he had a shameful
consciousness that the old serene and complacent look, when he tried it,
was sadly crossed by rigid lines of hard anxiety and shame. The mask was
indeed broken--the nakedness and villainy could no more be hidden! And
even the voice, faithful and obedient hitherto, always holding the same
rhythmical pace, had suddenly broken rein, galloping up and down the
gamut in a husky jangling.

"Mr. Plausaby, let us walk," said Lurton, not affecting in the least to
ignore Plausaby's agitation. They walked in silence through the village
out to the prairie. Plausaby, habitually a sham, tried, to recover his
ground. He said something about his wife's not being quite sane, and was
going to caution Lurton about believing anything Mrs. Plausaby might say.

"Mr. Plausaby," said Lurton, "is it not better to repent of your sins and
make restitution, than to hide them?"

Plausaby cleared his throat and wiped the perspiration from his brow, but
he could not trust his voice to say anything.

It was vain to appeal to Plausaby to repent. He had saturated himself in
falsehood from the beginning. Perhaps, after all, the saturation had
began several generations back, and unhappy Plausaby, born to an
inheritance of falsehood, was to be pitied as well as blamed. He was even
now planning to extort from his vacillating wife a written statement that
should contradict any confession of hers to Isa and Lurton.

Fly swiftly, pen! For Isa Marlay knew the stake in this game, and she
did not mean that any chance of securing Charlton's release should be
neglected. She knew nothing of legal forms, but she could write a
straight-out statement after a woman's fashion. So she wrote a paper
which read as follows:

"I do not expect to live long, and I solemnly confess that I took the
land-warrant from Smith Westcott's letter, for which my son Albert
Charlton is now unjustly imprisoned in the penitentiary, and I did it
without the knowledge of Albert, and at the instigation of Thomas
Plausaby, my husband."

This paper Isa read to Mrs. Plausaby, and that lady, after much
vacillation, signed it with a feeble hand. Then Isabel wrote her own name
as a witness. But she wanted another witness. At this moment Mrs. Ferret
came in, having an instinctive feeling that a second visit from Lurton
boded something worth finding out. Isa took her into Mrs. Plausaby's room
and told