CHAPTER XII

THE NIGHT WIND’S MYSTERY

After the departure of Lawler on the night of Gary Warden’s visit to the Hamlin cabin, silence, vast and deep reigned inside.  The last golden shadows from the sinking sun were turning somber shades of twilight as Ruth came to the door and peered outward, to see Lawler riding away.

For a long time the girl watched Lawler, her face burning with shame over what had happened, her senses revolting from the realization of the things Lawler knew concerning her father.  Then she seated herself on the threshold of the doorway, watching the long shadows steal over the plains.

She loved Lawler; she never had attempted to deny it, not even to herself.  And she had found it hard to restrain herself when he had stood outside the door of her room gravely pleading with her.  Only pride had kept her from yielding—­the humiliating conviction that she was not good enough for him—­or rather that her father’s crimes had made it impossible for her to accept him upon a basis of equality.

She felt that Lawler would take her upon any terms—­indeed, his manner while in the cabin shortly before convinced her of that; but she did not want to go to him under those conditions.  She would have felt, always, as though pity for her had influenced him.  She felt that she would always be searching his eyes, looking for signs which would indicate that he was thinking of her father.  And he was certain to think of him—­those thoughts would come in spite of his efforts to forget; they would be back of every glance he threw at her; they would be lurking always near, to humiliate her.  The conviction sent a shudder over her.

The girl’s mental processes were not involved; they went directly, unwaveringly, to the truth—­the truth as her heart revealed it, as she knew it must be.  If there was any subconscious emotion in her heart or mind from which might spring chaotic impulses that would cloud her mental vision, she was not aware of it.  Her thoughts ran straight and true to the one outstanding, vivid, and overwhelming fact that she could not marry Kane Lawler because to marry him would mean added humiliation.

Greatness, Ruth knew, was hedged about by simplicity.  Lawler was as direct in his attitude toward life—­and to herself—­as she.  There was about him no wavering, no indecision, no mulling over in his mind the tangled threads of thought that would bring confusion.  The steel fiber of his being was unelastic.  He met the big questions of life with an eagerness to solve them instantly.

He wanted her—­she knew.  But she assured herself that she could not bring upon him the shame and ignominy of a relationship with a cattle thief, no matter how intensely he wanted her.  That would be doing him an injustice, and she would never agree to it.

But it hurt, this knowledge that she could not marry Lawler; that she must put away from her the happiness that might be hers for the taking; that she must crush the eager impulses that surged through her; that she must repulse the one man who could make her heart beat faster; the man for whom she longed with an intensity that sometimes appalled her.