the space, perhaps fifty paces distant.
Hough drew Allie closer to Ancliffe. “Get behind me,” he whispered.
A sharp ripping and splitting of wood told of Ancliffe’s progress; also
it located the fugitives for Durade’s gang. The light vanished; quick
voices rasped out; then stealthy feet padded over the boards.
Allie saw or imagined she saw gliding forms black against the pale
gloom. She was so close to Ancliffe that he touched her as he worked.
Turning, she beheld a ray of light through an aperture he had made.
Suddenly the gloom split to a reddish flare. It revealed dark forms. A
gun cracked. Allie heard the heavy thud of a bullet against the wall.
Then Hough shot. His derringer made a small, spiteful report. It was
followed by a cry--a groan. Other guns cracked. Bullets pattered on the
wood. Allie heard the spat of lead striking Hough. It had a sickening
sound. He moved as if from a blow. A volley followed and Allie saw the
bright flashes. All about her bullets were whistling and thudding. She
knew with a keen horror every time Hough was struck. Hoarse yells and
strangling cries mixed with the diminishing shots.
Then Ancliffe grasped her and pushed her through a vent he had made.
Allie crawled backward and she could see Hough still standing in front.
It seemed that he swayed. Then as she rose further her view was cut off.
Although she had not looked around, she was aware of a dimly lighted
storeroom. Outside the shots had ceased. She heard something heavy fall
suddenly; then a patter of quick, light footsteps.
Ancliffe essayed to get through the opening feet first. It was a tight
squeeze, or else some one held him back. There came a crashing of wood;
Ancliffe’s body whirled in the aperture and he struggled violently.
Allie heard hissing, sibilant Spanish utterances. She stood petrified,
certain that Durade had attacked Ancliffe. Suddenly the Englishman
crashed through, drawing a supple, twisting, slender man with him. He
held this man by the throat with one hand and by the wrist with the
other. Allie recognized Durade’s Mexican ally. He gripped a knife and
the blade was bloody.
Once inside, where Ancliffe could move, he handled the Mexican with
deliberate and remorseless ease. Allie saw him twist and break the arm
which held the knife. Not that sight, but the eyes of the Mexican made
Allie close her own. When she opened them, at a touch, Ancliffe stood
beside her and the Mexican lay quivering. Ancliffe held the bloody
knife; he hid it under his coat.
“Come,” he said. His voice seemed thin.
“But Hough! We must--”
Ancliffe’s strange gesture froze Allie’s lips. She followed him--clung
close to him. There were voices near--and persons. All seemed to fall
back before the Englishman. He strode on. Indeed, his movements appeared
unnatural. They went down a low stairway, out into the dark. Lights were
there to the right, and hurrying forms. Ancliffe ran with her in the
other direction. Only dim, pale lamps shone through tents. Down this
side street it was quiet and dark. Allie stumbled, too. He turned a
corner and proceeded rapidly toward bright lights. The houses loomed
big. Down that way many people passed to and fro. Allie’s senses
recognized a new sound--a confusion of music, dancing, hilarity, all
distinct, near at hand. She could scarcely keep up with Ancliffe. He did
not speak nor look to right or left.
At the corner of a large house--a long structure which sent out gleams
of light--Ancliffe opened a door and pulled Allie into a hallway, dark
near at hand, but brilliant at the other end. He drew her along this
passage, striding slower now and unsteadily. He turned into another
hall lighted by lamps. Music and gaiety seemed to sweep stunningly
into Allie’s face. But Allie saw only one person there--a Negress. As
Ancliffe halted, the Negress rose from her seat. She was frightened.
“Call Stanton--quick!” he panted. He thrust gold at her. “Tell no one
else!”
Then he opened a door, pushed Allie into a handsomely furnished parlor,
and, closing the door, staggered to a couch, upon which he fell. His
face wore a singular look, remarkable for its whiteness. All its weary,
careless indifference had vanished.
As he lay back his hands loosed their hold of his coat and fell away all
bloody. The knife slid to the floor. A crimson froth flecked his lips.
“Oh--Heaven! You were--stabbed!” gasped Allie, sinking to her knees.
“If Stanton doesn’t come in time--tell her what happened--ask her to
fetch Neale to you,” he said. He spoke with extreme difficulty and a
fluttering told of blood in his throat. Allie could not speak. She
could not pray. But her sight and her perception were abnormally keen.
Ancliffe’s strange, dear gaze rested upon her, and it seemed to Allie
that he smiled, not with lips or face, but in spirit. How strange and
beautiful.
Then Allie heard a rush of silk at the door. It opened--closed. A woman
of fair face, bare of arm and neck, glittering with diamonds, swept
into the parlor. She had great, dark-blue eyes full of shadows and they
flashed from Ancliffe to Allie and back again.
“What’s happened? You’re pale as death!... Ancliffe! Your hands--your
breast!... My God!”
She bent over him. “Stanton, I’ve been--cut up--and Hough is--dead.”
“Oh, this horrible Benton!” cried the woman.
“Don’t faint... Hear me. You remember we were curious about a
girl--Durade had in his place. This is she--Allie Lee. She is innocent.
Durade held her for revenge. He had loved--then hated her mother...
Hough won all Durade’s gold--and then the girl... But we had to fight...
Stanton, this Allie Lee is Neale’s sweetheart... He believes her dead...
You hide her--bring Neale to her.”
Quickly she replied, “I promise you, Ancliffe, I promise... How
strange--what you tell!... But not strange for Benton!... Ancliffe!
Speak to me!--Oh, he is going!”
With her first words a subtle change passed over Ancliffe. It was the
release of his will. His whole body sank. Under the intense whiteness
of his face a cold gray shade began to creep. His last conscious instant
spent itself in the strange gaze Allie had felt before, and now she
had a vague perception that in some way it expressed a blessing and a
deliverance. The instant the beautiful light turned inward, as if to
illumine the darkness of his soul, she divined what he had once been,
his ruin, his secret and eternal remorse--and the chance to die that had
made him great.
So, forgetful of the other beside her, Allie Lee watched Ancliffe,
sustained by a nameless spirit, feeling with tragic pity her duty as a
woman--to pray for him, to stay beside him, that he might not be alone
when he died.
And while she watched, with the fading of that singular radiance, there
returned to his face a slow, careless weariness.
“He’s gone!” murmured Stanton, rising. A dignity had come to her. “Dead!
And we knew nothing of him--not his real name--nor his place ... But
even Benton could not keep him from dying like an English gentleman.”
She took Allie by the hand, led her out of the parlor and across the
hall into a bedroom. Then she faced Allie, wonderingly, with all a
woman’s sympathy, and something else that Allie sensed as a sweet and
poignant wistfulness.
“Are you--Neale’s sweetheart?” she asked, very low.
“Oh--please--find him--for me!” sobbed Allie.
The tenderness in this woman’s voice and look and touch was what Allie
needed more than anything, and it made her a trembling child. How
strangely, hesitatingly, with closing eyes, this woman reached to fold
her in gentle arms. What a tumult Allie felt throbbing in the full
breast where she laid her head.
“Allie Lee!... and he thinks you dead,” she murmured, brokenly. “I will
bring him--to you.”
When she released Allie years and shadows no longer showed in her face.
Her eyes were tear-wet and darkening; her lips were tremulous. At that
moment there was something beautiful and terrible about her.
But Allie could not understand.
“You stay here,” she said. “Be very quiet... I will bring Neale.”
Opening the door, she paused on the threshold, to glance down the hall
first, and then back to Allie. Her smile was beautiful. She closed the
door and locked it. Allie heard the soft swish of silk dying away.
26
Beauty Stanton threw a cloak over her bare shoulders and, hurriedly
leaving the house by the side entrance, she stood a moment, breathless
and excited, in the dark and windy street.
She had no idea why she halted there, for she wanted to run. But the
instant she got out into the cool night air a check came to action and
thought. Strange sensations poured in upon her--the darkness, lonesome
and weird; the wailing wind with its weight of dust; the roar of
Benton’s main thoroughfare; and the low, strange murmur, neither musical
nor mirthful, behind her, from that huge hall she called her home.
Stranger even than these emotions were the swelling and aching of her
heart, the glow and quiver of her flesh, thrill on thrill, deep, like
bursting pages of joy never before experienced, the physical sense of a
touch, inexplicable in its power.
On her bare breast a place seemed to flush and throb and glow. “Ah!”
murmured Beauty Stanton. “That girl laid her face here--over my
heart! What was I to do?” she murmured. “Oh yes--to find her
sweetheart--Neale!” Then she set off rapidly, but if she had possessed
wings or the speed of the wind she could not have kept pace with her
thoughts.
She turned the corner of the main street and glided among the hurrying
throng. Men stood in groups, talking excitedly. She gathered that there
had been fights. More than once she was addressed familiarly, but
she did not hear what was said. The wide street seemed strange, dark,
dismal, the lights yellow and flaring, the wind burdened, the dark tide
of humanity raw, wild animal, unstable. Above the lights and the throngs
hovered a shadow--not the mantle of night nor the dark desert sky.
Her steps took familiar ground, yet she seemed not to know this Benton.
“Once I was like Allie Lee!” she whispered. “Not so many years ago.”
And the dark tide of men, the hurry and din, the wind and dust, the
flickering lights, all retreated spectral--like to the background of
a mind returned to youth, hope, love, home. She saw herself at
eighteen--yes, Beauty Stanton even then, possessed of a beauty that was
her ruin; at school, the favorite of a host of boys and girls; at home,
where the stately oaks were hung with silver moss and the old
Colonial house rang with song of sister and sport of brother, where a
sweet-faced, gentle-voiced mother--
“Ah... Mother!” And at that word the dark tide of men seemed to rise and
swell at her, to trample her sacred memory as inevitably and brutally as
it had used her body.
Only the piercing pang of that memory remained with Beauty Stanton. She
was a part of Benton. She was treading the loose board-walk of the great
and vile construction camp. She might draw back from leer and touch, but
none the less was she there, a piece of this dark, bold, obscure life.
She was a cog in the wheel, a grain of dust in the whirlwind, a morsel
of flesh and blood for the hungry maw of a wild and passing monster of
progress.
Her hurried steps carried her on with her errand. Neale! She knew
where to find him. Often she had watched him play, always regretfully,
conscious that he did not fit there. His indifference had baffled her as
it had piqued her professional vanity. Men had never been indifferent to
her; she had seen them fight for her mocking smiles. But Neale! He had
been stone to her charm, yet kind, gracious, deferential. Always she
had felt strangely shamed when he stood bareheaded before her. Beauty
Stanton had foregone respect. Yet respect was what she yearned for. The
instincts of her girlhood, surviving, made a whited sepulcher of her
present life. She could not bear Neale’s indifference and she had failed
to change it. Her infatuation, born of that hot-bed of Benton life,
had beaten and burned itself to destruction against a higher and better
love--the only love of her womanhood. She would have slaved for him. But
he had passed her by, absorbed with his own secret, working toward some
fateful destiny, lost, perhaps, like all the others there.
And now she learned that the mystery of him--his secret--was the same
old agony of love that sent so many on endless, restless roads--Allie
Lee! and he believed her dead!
After all the bitterness, life had moments of sweetest joy. Fate was
being a little kind to her--Beauty Stanton. It would be from her lips
Neale would hear that Allie Lee was alive--Beauty Stanton’s soul seemed
to soar with the realization of how that news would uplift Neale, craze
him with happiness, change his life, save him. He was going to hear
the blessed tidings from a woman whom he had scorned. Always afterward,
then, he would think of Beauty Stanton with a grateful heart. She was to
be the instrument of his salvation. Hough and Ancliffe had died to save
Allie Lee from the vile clutch of Benton; but to Beauty Stanton, the
woman of ill-fame, had been given the power. She gloried in it. Allie
Lee was safely hidden in her house. The iniquity of her establishment
furnished a haven for the body and life and soul of innocent Allie Lee.
Beauty Stanton marveled at the strange ways of life. If she could have
prayed, if she had ever dared to hope for some splendid duty, some
atonement to soften the dark, grim ending of her dark career, it
would not have been for so much as fate had now dealt to her. She was
overwhelmed with her opportunity.
All at once she reached the end of the street. On each side the wall
of lighted tents and houses ceased. Had she missed her way--gone down
a side street to the edge of the desert? No. The rows of lights behind
assured her this was the main street. Yet she was far from the railroad
station. The crowds of men hurried by, as always. Before her reached
a leveled space, dimly lighted, full of moving objects, and noise of
hammers and wagons, and harsh voices. Then suddenly she remembered.
Benton was being evacuated. Tents and houses were being taken down and
loaded on trains to be hauled to the next construction camp. Benton’s
day was done! This was the last night. She had forgotten that the
proprietor of her hall, from whom she rented it, had told her that early
on the morrow he would take it down section by section, load it on
the train, and put it together again for her in the next town. In
forty-eight hours Benton would be a waste place of board floors, naked
frames, debris and sand, ready to be reclaimed by the desert. It would
be gone like a hideous nightmare, and no man would believe what had
happened there.
The gambling-hell where she had expected to find Neale had vanished,
in a few hours, as if by magic. Beauty Stanton retraced her steps. She
would find Neale in one of the other places--the Big Tent, perhaps.
This hall was unusually crowded, and the scene had the number of
men, though not the women and the hilarity and the gold, that was
characteristic of pay-day in Benton. All the tables in the gambling-room
were occupied.
Beauty Stanton stepped into this crowded room, her golden head
uncovered, white and rapt and strangely dark-eyed, with all the beauty
of her girlhood returned, and added to it that of a woman transformed,
supreme in her crowning hour. As a bad woman, infatuated and piqued, she
had failed to allure Neale to baseness; now as a good woman, with pure
motive, she would win his friendship, his eternal gratitude.
Stanton had always been a target for eyes, yet never as now, when she
drew every gaze like a dazzling light in a dark room.
As soon as she saw Neale she forgot every one else in that hall. He
was gambling. He did not look up. His brow was somber and dark.
She approached--stood behind him. Some of the players spoke to her,
familiarly, as was her bitter due. Then Neale turned apparently to bow
with his old courtesy. Thrill on thrill coursed over her. Always he had
showed her respect, deference.
Her heart was full. She had never before enjoyed a moment like this. She
was about to separate him from the baneful and pernicious life of the
camps--to tender him a gift of unutterable happiness--to give all of him
back to the work of the great railroad.
She put a trembling hand on his shoulder--bent over him. “Neale--come
with me,” she whispered.
He shook his head.
“Yes! Yes!” she returned, her voice thrilling with emotion.
Wearily, with patient annoyance, he laid down his cards and looked up.
His dark eyes held faint surprise and something that she thought might
be pity.
“Miss Stanton--pardon me--but please understand--No!”
Then he turned and, picking up his cards, resumed the game.
Beauty Stanton suffered a sudden vague check. It was as if a cold
thought was trying to enter a warm and glowing mind. She found speech
difficult. She could not get off the track of her emotional flight. Her
woman’s wit, tact, knowledge of men, would not operate.
“Neale!... Come with--me!” she cried, brokenly. “There’s--”
Some men laughed coarsely. That did not mean anything to Stanton until
she saw how it affected Neale. His face flushed red and his hands
clenched the cards.
“Say, Neale,” spoke up this brutal gamester, with a sneer, “never mind
us. Go along with your lady friend... You’re ahead of the game--as I
reckon she sees.”
Neale threw the cards in the man’s face; then, rising, he bent over to
slap him so violently as to knock him off his chair.
The crash stilled the room. Every man turned to watch.
Neale stood up, his right arm down, menacingly. The gambler arose,
cursing, but made no move to draw a weapon.
Beauty Stanton could not, to save her life, speak the words she wanted
to say. Something impeding, totally unexpected, seemed to have arisen.
“Neale--come with--me!” was all she could say.
“No!” he declared, vehemently, with a gesture of disgust and anger.
That, following the coarse implication of the gambler, conveyed to
Stanton what all these men imagined. The fools! The fools! A hot
vibrating change occurred in her emotion, but she controlled it. Neale
turned his back upon her. The crowd saw and many laughed. Stanton felt
the sting of her pride, the leap of her blood. She was misunderstood,
but what was that to her? As Neale stepped away she caught his arm--held
him while she tried to get close to him so she could whisper. He shook
her off. His face was black with anger. He held up one hand in a gesture
that any woman would have understood and hated. It acted powerfully upon
Beauty Stanton. Neale believed she was importuning him. To him her look,
whisper, touch had meant only the same as to these coarse human animals
gaping and grinning as they listened. The sweetest and best and most
exalted moment she had ever known was being made bitter as gall,
sickening, hateful. She must speak openly, she must make him understand.
“Allie Lee!... At my house!” burst out Stanton, and then, as if struck
by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.
The change in Neale was swift, terrible. Not comprehension, but passion
transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious, agonized, acting
in seeming righteous and passionate repudiation of a sacrilege.
“------!” His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that
could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton’s soul into hellish
revolt. Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her. He
struck her--hard--across the mouth.
“Don’t breathe that name!”
Beauty Stanton’s fear suddenly broke. Blindly she ran out into the
street. She fell once--jostled against a rail. The lights blurred; the
street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through deadened
ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and unreal.
“He struck me! He called me------!” she gasped. And the exaltation of
the last hour vanished as if it had never been. All the passion of her
stained and evil years leaped into ascendency. “Hell--hell! I’ll have
him knifed--I’ll see him dying! I’ll wet my hands in his blood! I’ll
spit in his face as he dies!”
So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house. There
is no flame of hate so sudden and terrible and intense as that of
the lost woman. Beauty Stanton’s blood had turned to vitriol. Men had
wronged her, ruined her, dragged her down into the mire. One by one,
during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had
each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave
behind something evil in exchange. She was what they had made her. Her
soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea. Her heart
was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires. Her body was
a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs. The weight of all
the iron and stone used in the construction of the great railroad was
the burden upon her shoulders. These dark streams of humanity passing
her in the street, these beasts of men, these hairy-breasted toilers,
had found in her and her kind the strength or the incentive to endure,
to build, to go on. And one of them, stupid, selfish, merciless, a man
whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she
had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself--he
had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before
a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no
pardon from her class, a name that evoked all the furies and the powers
of hell.
“Oh, to cut him--to torture him--to burn him alive... But it would not
be enough!” she panted.
And into the mind that had been lately fixed in happy consciousness of
her power of good there flashed a thousand scintillating, corruscating
gleams of evil thought. And then came a crowning one, an inspiration
straight from hell.
“By God! I’ll make of Allie Lee the thing I am! The thing he struck--the
thing he named!”
The woman in Beauty Stanton ceased to be. All that breathed, in that
hour, was what men had made her. Revenge, only a word! Murder, nothing!
Life, an implacable, inexplicable, impossible flux and reflux of
human passion! Reason, intelligence, nobility, love, womanhood,
motherhood--all the heritage of her sex--had been warped by false and
abnormal and terrible strains upon her physical and emotional life. No
tigress, no cannibal, no savage, no man, no living creature except a
woman of grace who knew how far she had fallen could have been capable
of Beauty Stanton’s deadly and immutable passion to destroy. Thus life
and nature avenged her. Her hate was immeasurable. She who could have
walked naked and smiling down the streets of Benton or out upon the
barren desert to die for the man she loved had in her the inconceivable
and mysterious passion of the fallen woman; she could become a flame,
a scourge, a fatal wind, a devastation. She was fire to man; to her own
sex, ice. Stanton reached her house and entered. Festivities in honor
of the last night of Benton were already riotously in order. She placed
herself well back in the shadow and watched the wide door.
“The first man who enters I’ll give him this key!” she hissed.
She was unsteady on her feet. All her frame quivered. The lights in the
hall seemed to have a reddish tinge. She watched. Several men passed
out. Then a tall, stalking form appeared, entering.
A ball of fire in Stanton’s breast leaped and burst. She had recognized
in that entering form the wildest, the most violent and the most
dangerous man in Benton--Larry Red King.
Stanton stepped forward and for the first time in the cowboy’s presence
she did not experience that singular chill of gloom which he was wont to
inspire in her.
Her eyes gloated over King. Tall, lean, graceful, easy, with his flushed
ruddy face and his flashing blue eyes and the upstanding red hair, he
looked exactly what he was--a handsome red devil, fearing no man or
thing, hell-bent in his cool, reckless wildness.
He appeared to be half-drunk. Stanton was trained to read the faces of
men who entered there; and what she saw in King’s added the last and
crowning throb of joy to her hate. If she had been given her pick of
the devils in Benton she would have selected this stalking, gun-packing
cowboy.
“Larry, I’ve a new girl here,” she said. “Come.”