“I lifted her up, but she hung limp and lifeless over my arm. I laid her head on my breast and begged her to come back to me, to call me her Jack once more, and say she’d forgive me, and I’d never lift my hand ag’in her ag’in, nor touch another drop as long as I lived. But ‘twan’t no use. She lay there quiet and peaceful enough, but there was that dreadful purple mark and cut on her forehead where it had hit the stove. She wa’n’t cold or stiff as I thought dead people always were, but there wa’n’t no sign of life about her either and I laid her down again, my heart a-breakin’, and feelin’ like another Cain, only worse, for I’d killed a woman, and she my own wife! “Then I began to think what would happen if I was found there, and I grew frightened. I couldn’t make up my mind to stay and confess what I’d done, and hang like a dog for it, so I got together a few things and all the money that Margery had in her own little box, and the boy’s safe, and wrappin’ him in a shawl—for I daren’t leave him while there was a breath o’ life in him and a chance of savin’ him—I stole out of the house, without even darin’ to give my girl a kiss after the ill I’d done her and made for a station a mile or more away. “I had an awful time of it, for the boy moaned every minute of the time; but I told people on the cars that he’d had a fall and I was takin’ him to a doctor. I traveled all day in the fastest trains, and got to a town just about dusk. Here I called a doctor to the boy. He doubted if he could save him; but he pulled through after five weeks of terrible fever and pain, though when he got up again, lookin’ more like a spirit than like flesh and blood, he didn’t know me or remember anything that had happened. The doctor said he was a fool, and always would be one.” It seemed very strange to Geoffrey to be sitting there in his right mind and listening to this dreadful story about himself. It seemed almost like a case of dual existence. “As soon as he was well enough,” Jack went on, “I felt that we ought to be gettin’ out of that place; it was too near home to be safe, and the police were liable to get on my track any day. So I began my roamin’. First we went to Texas, where I got work on a cattle and sheep ranch. After a time I scraped together a little money, and started out to raise sheep for myself. It wa’n’t easy to be with any one, lest somebody should come along who had heard about what I’d done, and I might get snapped up. The boy and me lived in a cabin by ourselves, away from everybody else, but I never let him out of my sight, and I grew that fond of him I would have died rather than let harm come to him, and I’d vowed I’d do the best I could by him as long as I lived, and get together something handsome to leave him, to make up as far as I could for the deadly wrong I’d done him. As soon as I could get enough together, I meant to take him to some place where they care for them that have lost their mind.