Eudora now came to her mother with great news.  Hawks had taken the first opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim’s release from jail and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the eating-house.  He had not deferred the telling from any feeling of reticence regarding the disclosure of family affairs before strangers.  News travels in the desert by some unknown agency.  Twenty-four hours after a thing happened it would be safe to assume that every cow and sheep outfit in a radius of three hundred miles would be discussing it over their camp-fires; and this long before there was an inch of telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the country.  Hawks had merely reserved the news for Eudora’s private ear because he hoped thus to gain an advantage over his three rivals.

“Ai-yi!” said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt stand-still.  “In the name o’ Heaven, how kem they to let him out?” Mrs. Rodney’s knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not understand giving him his freedom.  To her the case was analogous to releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to play with matches.  “How kem they to let him out?” she repeated, the still rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or the justice-seat.  “I ‘ain’t hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the jail an’ Jim in years.”

The meaning that she put into her words belied their harsh face-value.  With Jim in jail, her mind was comparatively at rest about him.  She knew he had been branding other men’s cattle since the destruction of his sheep, and she knew the fate of cattle-thieves, and that Jim would be no exception to the rule.  With her purely instinctive maternity, she had been fond of Jim.  He had been one more boy to mother.  She harbored no ill-feeling towards him that he was not her own.  Moreover, she wanted no gallows-tree intermingled with the annals of her family.  It suited her convenience at this particular time that Jim should stay in jail.  That he had been given his freedom loosed the phials of her condemnation on the incompetents that released him.

“I ‘low they wuz grudgin’ him the mouthful they fed to him, that they ack so outdaciously plumb locoed as to tu’n a man out to get hisself hanged.  An’ Jim never wuz a hearty eater.  He never seemed to relish his food, even when he wuz a growin’ kid.”

A pale, twinkling point of light, faintly glimmering in the vast solitudes above the billowing peaks, suddenly burst into a dazzling constellation before the girl and her mother.  “It’s a warning!” shivered the old woman.  “Some’um’s bound to happen.”  She began to rock herself slowly.  The thing she dreaded had already come to pass in her imagination.  Jim a free man was Jim a dead man.  He was so dead that already his step-mother was going on with a full acceptance of the idea.  She reviewed her relationship to him.  No, she had nothing to blame herself for.  He had been more troublesome than any of her own children and for that reason she had been more liberal with the rod.  And yet—­the face of the squaw rose before her, wraithlike, accusing!  “Ai-yi!” she said; but this time her favorite expletive was hardly more than a sigh.