The low voice ceased, and Lassiter slowly turned his sombrero round and round, and appeared to be counting the silver ornaments on the band.  Jane, leaning toward him, sat as if petrified, listening intently, waiting to hear more.  She could have shrieked, but power of tongue and lips were denied her.  She saw only this sad, gray, passion-worn man, and she heard only the faint rustling of the leaves.

“Well, I came to Cottonwoods,” went on Lassiter, “an’ you showed me Milly’s grave.  An’ though your teeth have been shut tighter ’n them of all the dead men lyin’ back along that trail, jest the same you told me the secret I’ve lived these eighteen years to hear!  Jane, I said you’d tell me without ever me askin’.  I didn’t need to ask my question here.  The day, you remember, when that fat party throwed a gun on me in your court, an’—­”

“Oh!  Hush!” whispered Jane, blindly holding up her hands.

“I seen in your face that Dyer, now a bishop, was the proselyter who ruined Milly Erne.”

For an instant Jane Withersteen’s brain was a whirling chaos and she recovered to find herself grasping at Lassiter like one drowning.  And as if by a lightning stroke she sprang from her dull apathy into exquisite torture.

“It’s a lie!  Lassiter!  No, no!” she moaned.  “I swear—­you’re wrong!”

“Stop!  You’d perjure yourself!  But I’ll spare you that.  You poor woman!  Still blind!  Still faithful!...Listen.  I know.  Let that settle it.  An’ I give up my purpose!”

“What is it—­you say?”

“I give up my purpose.  I’ve come to see an’ feel differently.  I can’t help poor Milly.  An’ I’ve outgrowed revenge.  I’ve come to see I can be no judge for men.  I can’t kill a man jest for hate.  Hate ain’t the same with me since I loved you and little Fay.”

“Lassiter!  You mean you won’t kill him?” Jane whispered.

“No.”

“For my sake?”

“I reckon.  I can’t understand, but I’ll respect your feelin’s.”

“Because you—­oh, because you love me?...Eighteen years!  You were that terrible Lassiter!  And now—­because you love me?”

“That’s it, Jane.”

“Oh, you’ll make me love you!  How can I help but love you?  My heart must be stone.  But—­oh, Lassiter, wait, wait!  Give me time.  I’m not what I was.  Once it was so easy to love.  Now it’s easy to hate.  Wait!  My faith in God—­some God—­still lives.  By it I see happier times for you, poor passion-swayed wanderer!  For me—­a miserable, broken woman.  I loved your sister Milly.  I will love you.  I can’t have fallen so low—­I can’t be so abandoned by God—­that I’ve no love left to give you.  Wait!  Let us forget Milly’s sad life.  Ah, I knew it as no one else on earth!  There’s one thing I shall tell you—­if you are at my death-bed, but I can’t speak now.”

“I reckon I don’t want to hear no more,” said Lassiter.

Jane leaned against him, as if some pent-up force had rent its way out, she fell into a paroxysm of weeping.  Lassiter held her in silent sympathy.  By degrees she regained composure, and she was rising, sensible of being relieved of a weighty burden, when a sudden start on Lassiter’s part alarmed her.