Lawson died a week ago."

"How?"

"Fell from his horse somewhere up in a canyon--he was drunk, I reckon.
They found him twenty-four hours afterward. The superintendent of the
mines wrote to Leverich. He'd tried to keep pretty straight out there,
all but the drinking, I guess that was too much for him. It was the
best thing he could do--to die--as Girard says. Girard hates the very
sound of his name."

"Oh," breathed Dosia painfully.

"The superintendent said that some of the miners chipped in to bury him,
and the woman he boarded with sent a pencil scrawl along with the
superintendent's letter to say that she'd 'miss Mr. Barr
dreadful,'--that he'd get up and get the breakfast when she was sick,
and 'the kids, they thought the world of him.' She signed herself, 'A
true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.'"

Lawson was dead!

Dosia sat there, her hand clasping Billy's sleeve as at first--something
tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room; even that
haunting consciousness that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far,
hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead
body--Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking, caressing eyes, those
curving, passionate lips, closed forever, the blood oozing from between
his dark locks. As ever with poor Dosia, there was that sharp,
unbearable pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation. Of what avail
her prayers, her belief in him, when he had died thus? Oh, she had not
prayed enough. She had not been good enough to be allowed to help; she
had not believed hard enough. Perhaps it had helped just a little--he
had "tried to keep pretty straight, all but the drinking; that was too
much for him."

That covered some resistance in an underworld of which she knew nothing.
Poor Lawson, who had never had the right chance, whose youth had been
poisoned at the start! In that grave where he lay, drunkard and reveler,
part of the youth of her, Dosia Linden,--once his promised wife, to whom
she had given herself in her soul,--must always lie too, buried with
him; nothing could undo that. To die so causelessly! But the miners had
cared a little; he had been kind to a woman and her little
children--"the kids had thought the world of him"; she was "a true
mourner, Mrs. Wilson." Dosia imagined him cheeringly cooking for this
poor, worn-out mother, carrying the children from place to place as she
had once seen him carry that little boy home from the ball, long, long