“Lee thought I’d killed Stanton,” muttered Neale, in intense perplexity.  “But she—­she told them Larry did it....  What a strange idea Lee had—­and General Lodge, too.  He defended me....  Ah!”

Suddenly Neale drew from his pocket the little leather note-book that had been Stanton’s, and which contained her letter to him.  With trembling hands he opened it.  Again this letter was to mean a revelation.

General Lodge had said his engineer had read aloud only the first of that message to Neale; and from this Allison Lee and all the listeners had formed their impressions.

Neale read these first lines.

“No wonder they imagined I killed her!” he exclaimed.  “She accuses me.  But she never meant what they imagined she meant.  Why, that evidence could hang me! ...  Allie told them she saw Larry do it.  And it’s common knowledge now—­I’ve heard it here....  What, then, had Allie to forgive—­to forgive with eyes that will haunt me to my grave?”

Then the truth burst upon him with merciless and stunning force.

“My God!  Allie believed what they all believed—­what I must have blindly made seem true! ...  That I was Beauty Stanton’s lover!”

34

The home to which Allie Lee was brought stood in the outskirts of
Omaha upon a wooded bank above the river.

Allie watched the broad, yellow Missouri swirling by.  She liked best to be alone outdoors in the shade of the trees.  In the weeks since her arrival there she had not recovered from the shock of meeting Neale only to be parted from him.

But the comfort, the luxury of her home, the relief from constant dread, such as she had known for years, the quiet at night—­these had been so welcome, so saving, that her burden of sorrow seemed endurable.  Yet in time she came to see that the finding of a father and a home had only added to her bitterness.

Allison Lee’s sister, an elderly woman of strong character, resented the home-bringing of this strange, lost daughter.  Allie had found no sympathy in her.  For a while neighbors and friends of the Lees’ flocked to the house and were kind, gracious, attentive to Allie.  Then somehow her story, or part of it, became gossip.  Her father, sensitive, cold, embittered by the past, suffered intolerable shame at the disgrace of a wife’s desertion and a daughter’s notoriety.  Allie’s presence hurt him; he avoided her as much as possible; the little kindnesses that he had shown, and his feelings of pride in her beauty and charm, soon vanished.  There was no love between them.  Allie had tried hard to care for him, but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West.  She was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him.  And there came a day when she realized that he did not believe she had come unscathed through the wilds of the gold-fields and the vileness of the construction camps.  She bore this patiently, though it stung her.  But the loss of respect for her father did not come until she heard men in his study, loud-voiced and furious, wrangle over contracts and accuse him of double-dealing.