Ever at climaxes time seems suspended.  Whether it was a second or a minute he stood there so, they who watched could never tell.  What they did know was that at last he turned, stood facing them.  All their lives they had seen passion, seen it in every phase, seen it until it was commonplace.  It was in the very air of the frontier, to be expected, life of the life; but as this man shifted they saw a kind of which they had never dreamed.  For How Landor was master of himself again, master, as well—­they knew it, every man and youth who saw,—­of them.  For another indefinitely long deathly silent space he merely looked at them; looked eye to eye, individual by individual, into every face within the surrounding semi-circle.  Once before another man, a drunken cowman, had seen that identical look.  Now not one but a score saw it, felt a terrible ice-cold menace creep from his brain into their brains.  Even yet he did not speak, did not make a sound; nor did they.  Explain it as you will, he did this thing.  Another thing he did as well; and that was the end.  Slowly, deliberately, he stepped to the platform and held out his hand.  Obediently the girl followed.  She was not crying now.  Her eyes were red and a drop of blood came now and then to her lips; but she had grown wonderfully quiet all at once, wonderfully calm—­almost as much so as the man.  Deliberately as he had stepped down into the spectators’ midst, the Indian took the old telescope from the girl’s hand and, she following by his side, moved a step forward.  He did not touch her again nor did she him.  They merely moved ahead toward the sidewalk that led up the single street; moved deliberately, leisurely, as though they were alone.  Not around the crowd, but straight through it they passed; through a lane that opened as by magic as they went, and as by magic closed behind them, until they were within a solid human square.  But of all the assembled spectators that day, an aggregation irresponsible, unchivalrous as no other rabble on earth—­a mob of the frontier,—­not one spoke to challenge their action, not one attempted to bar their way.  The complete length of the platform they went so, turned the corner by the station—­and, simultaneously, the crowd disappeared from view, hid by the building itself.  Then in sudden reaction, the girl weakened.  Irresistibly she caught at the man’s arm, held it fast.

“Oh, How!  How!” she trembled, “is it to be always like this with you and me?  Is it to be always, everywhere, so?”

But the man said never a word.

* * * * *

Two hours had passed.  The girl had breakfasted.  A wood fire crackled cheerfully in the sheet iron heater of the tiny room where the same two people sat alone.  Already the world had taken on a different aspect.  Not that Elizabeth Landor had forgotten that recent incident at the depot.  She would never forget it.  It had merely passed into temporary abeyance, taken its proper place in the eternal scheme of things.  Another consideration, paramount, all-compelling, had inevitably crowded it from the stage.  It was this consideration that had held her silent far longer than was normal.  It was its overshadowing influence that at last prompted speech.