The latter took Rouletta’s hand in a warm and friendly clasp.  Her smiling lips were tremulous.  Engagingly, shyly, she said: 

“Pierce has told me how splendid you’ve been to him, and I’m sure you’re as happy as we are, but—­things always come out right if we wish for them hard enough.  Don’t you think so?”

The Countess Courteau was walking slowly when Rouletta overtook her a block or so down the street.  She looked up as the younger woman joined her.

“Well,” she said, “I presume you saw.  Not a look, not a thought for any one but her—­that other girl.”

“Yes, I saw.”  There was a pause, then:  “She’s wonderful.  I think I’m very glad.”

“Glad?” Hilda raised her brows; she glanced curiously at the speaker.

“If I had a brother I’d want him to love a girl like that.”

“But—­you have no brother, outside of ’Poleon Doret.”  Hilda was more than ever amazed when her companion laughed softly, contentedly.

“I know, but if I had one, I’d want him to be like—­Pierce.  I—­My dear, something has changed in me, oh, surprisingly!  I scarcely know what it is, but—­I’m walking on air and my eyes are open for the first time.  And you?  We’ve been honest with each other—­how do you feel?”

“I?” The Countess smiled wistfully.  “Why—­it doesn’t matter how I feel!  The boy has found himself, and nothing else is of the least importance.”

CHAPTER XXX

Joe McCaskey was not a coward, neither was he a superstitious man, but he had imagination.  The steady strain of his and Frank’s long flight, the certainty of pursuit close behind, had frayed his nerve and rendered him jumpy.  For a man in his condition to be awakened out of a trancelike sleep by an intruder at once invisible, dumb; to feel the presence of that mysterious visitor and actually to see him—­it—­bulked dim and formless among the darting shadows cast by a blazing match—­was a test indeed.  It was too much for Joe.

As for Frank, he had actually seen nothing, heard nothing except his brother’s voice, and then—­that sigh.  For that very reason his terror was, if anything, even greater than his brother’s.

During what seemed an age there was no sound except the stertorous breathing of the McCaskeys themselves and the stir of the dogs outside.  The pale square of the single window, over which a bleached-out cotton flour-sack had been tacked, let in only enough light to intensify the gloom.  Within the cabin was a blackness thick, tangible, oppressive; the brothers stared into it with bulging eyes and listened with ear-drums strained to the point of rupture.  Oddly enough, this utter silence augmented their agitation.  Unable finally to smother the evidence of his steadily growing fright, Frank uttered a half-audible moan.  Joe in the next bunk put it down as a new and threatening phenomenon.  What sort of thing was it that sighed and moaned thus?  As evidence of the direction Joe’s mind was taking, he wondered if these sounds could be the complaint of Courteau’s unshriven spirit.  It was a shocking thought, but involuntarily he gasped the dead man’s name.