“There could be but one other way,” repeated the voice slowly, repressedly.  “Tell me, please.  Let me know all.  Am I not right?”

To hesitate longer was needless cruelty; and in infinite pity, the blow fell.

“Yes, How,” said Manning gently, “Bess is dead.”

CHAPTER XIX

IN SIGHT OF GOD ALONE

An hour had passed.  Manning had gone; and on the horizon to the east whither he had taken his way not even a dot now indicated his former presence.  Even the close-fed grass whereon the wheels of the old road waggon had temporarily blazed a trail had returned normally erect.  Suddenly, as a rain cloud forms over the parched earth, the storm had gathered and broken; and passed on as though it had not been.  All about smiled the sunshine; sarcastic, isolate as though it had seen nothing, heard nothing.  On the surface of the pond the ducks, again returned, swam and splashed and dawdled in their endless holiday.  The eternal breeze of the prairie noontime, drifting leisurely by, sang its old, old song of abandon and of peace.  Not in the merest detail had nature, the serene, altered; not by the minutest trifle had she deviated from her customary course.  Man alone it is who changes to conform with the passing mood.  Man alone it was amid this primitive setting who had altered now.

For How Landor, the Indian, was no longer idle or dreaming.  Instead, his every action was that of one with a definite purpose.  Yet even then he did not hurry.  At first he seemed merely to be going about the ordinary routine of his life.  Methodically he kindled a fire and prepared himself a generous meal.  Deliberately, fair in the sunshine, he ate.  Then for the first time an observer who knew him well would have detected the unusual.  Contrary to all precedent the dishes were not washed or even touched.  Instead, the meal complete, he went swiftly toward the tent and disappeared inside.

For minutes he remained within, moving about from place to place; and when he again returned it was to do a peculiar thing indeed.  In his arms were several articles of clothing rolled into a bulky bundle.  Without a halt he made his way back to the place where he had eaten.  The fire which he had builded had burned low ere this; and, standing there beside it, he scraped away the ashes with the toe of his moccasined foot until the glowing embers beneath came to view.  The bundle he carried had opened with the action, revealing clearly the various articles of which it was composed.  Outside was an old army-blue greatcoat; within a battered felt hat and a pair of moccasins, wholly unused.  A moment the Indian stood looking at them meditatively, intensely; then gently as though they were a lost child he was returning to its mother’s arms he laid them fair upon the glowing coals.  Wool is slow to catch ablaze and for the moment they lay there black against the brown earth; then of a sudden, like the first lifting of an Indian signal smoke, a tiny column of blue went trailing upward.  Second by second it grew until with a muffled explosion the whole was ablaze.  Before the man had merely stood watching; now deliberately as before, yet as unhesitatingly, he returned to the tent.