The woman drew a step nearer, watching his face; tense, breathless.  Clearly he had turned her thoughts from the fence, and he slipped the knife in farther and continued to pry and twist the wire loose.  “How do you know it was a mistake?” she asked at last.

Tisdale laid the second wire down.  “Well, wasn’t it?  To punish yourself like this, to cheat yourself out of the best years of your life, when you knew how much Banks thought of you.  But you seem to have overlooked his side.  Do you think, when he knows how you crucified yourself, it’s going to make him any happier?  He carried a great spirit bottled in that small, wiry frame, but he got to seeing himself through your eyes.  He was ashamed of his failures—­he had always been a little sensitive about his size—­and it wasn’t the usual enthusiasm that started him to Alaska; he was stung into going.  It was like him to play his poor joke gamily, at the last, and pretend he didn’t care.  A word from you would have held him—­you must have known that—­and a letter from you afterwards, when you needed him, would have brought him back.  Or you might have joined him up there and made a home for him all these years, but you chose to bury yourself here in the desert of the Columbia, starving your soul, wasting your best on these goats.”  He paused with the last loosened wire in his hands and stood looking at her with condemning eyes.  “What made you?” he added, and his voice vibrated softly.  “What made you?”

The woman’s features worked; tears filled her eyes.

They must have been the first in many months, for they came with the gush that follows a probe.  “You know him,” she said brokenly.  “You’ve seen him lately, up there in Alaska.”

“I think so, yes.  The Johnny Banks I knew in the north told me something about a girl he left down in Oregon.  But she was a remarkably pretty girl, with merry black eyes and a nice color in her cheeks.  Seems to me she used to wear a pink gown sometimes, and a pink rose in her black hair, and made a picture that the fellows busy along the new railroad came miles on Sundays to see.”

A bleak smile touched the woman’s mouth.  “Dad always liked to see me wear nice clothes.  He said it advertised the store.”  Then her glance fell to her coarse, wretched skirt, and the contrast struck poignantly.

Tisdale moved the wires back, clearing a space for the bays to pass.  “There was one young engineer,” he went on, as though she had not spoken; “a big, handsome fellow, who came oftener than the rest.  Banks thought it was natural she should favor him.  The little man believes yet that when he was out of the way she married that engineer.”

The woman was beyond speech.  Tisdale had penetrated the last barrier of her fortitude.  The bitterness, pent so long, fostered in solitude, filled the vent and surged through.  Her shoulders shook, she stumbled a few steps to the poplar and, throwing up her arm against the bole, buried her face, sobbing, in her sleeve.