Then he stripped back the blanket, disclosing Wade’s face.  Columbine thrilled to the core of her heart.  Death was there, white and cold and merciless, but as it had released the tragic soul, the instant of deliverance had been stamped on the rugged, cadaverous visage, by a beautiful light; not of peace, nor of joy, nor of grief, but of hope!  Hope had been the last emotion of Hell-Bent Wade.

“Collie, listen,” said the old rancher, in deep and trembling tones.  “When a man’s dead, what he’s been comes to us with startlin’ truth.  Wade was the whitest man I ever knew.  He had a queer idee—­a twist in his mind—­an’ it was thet his steps were bent toward hell.  He imagined thet everywhere he traveled there he fetched hell.  But he was wrong.  His own trouble led him to the trouble of others.  He saw through life.  An’ he was as big in his hope fer the good as he was terrible in his dealin’ with the bad.  I never saw his like....  He loved you, Collie, better than you ever knew.  Better than Jack, or Wils, or me!  You know what the Bible says about him who gives his life fer his friend.  Wal, Wade was my friend, an’ Jack’s, only we never could see!...  An’ he was Wils’s friend.  An’ to you he must have been more than words can tell....  We all know what child’s play it would have been fer Wade to kill Jack without bein’ hurt himself.  But he wouldn’t do it.  So he spared me an’ Jack, an’ I reckon himself.  Somehow he made Jack fight an’ die like a man.  God only knows how he did that.  But it saved me from—­from hell—­an’ you an’ Wils from misery....  Wade could have taken you from me an’ Jack.  He had only to tell you his secret, an’ he wouldn’t.  He saw how you loved me, as if you were my real child....  But.  Collie, lass, it was he who was your father!”

With bursting heart Columbine fell upon her knees beside that cold, still form.

Belllounds softly left the room and closed the door behind him.

CHAPTER XX

Nature was prodigal with her colors that autumn.  The frosts came late, so that the leaves did not gradually change their green.  One day, as if by magic, there was gold among the green, and in another there was purple and red.  Then the hilltops blazed with their crowns of aspen groves; and the slopes of sage shone mellow gray in the sunlight; and the vines on the stone fences straggled away in lines of bronze; and the patches of ferns under the cliffs faded fast; and the great rock slides and black-timbered reaches stood out in their somber shades.

Columbines bloomed in all the dells among the spruces, beautiful stalks with heavy blossoms, the sweetest and palest of blue-white flowers.  Motionless they lifted their faces to the light.  Out in the aspen groves, where the grass was turning gold, the columbines blew gracefully in the wind, nodding and swaying.  The most exquisite and finest of these columbines hid in the shaded nooks, star-sweet in the silent gloom of the woods.