The little bent man at the house would look at them with a sort of helplessness when they came in, sometimes even forgetting the smile he was wont to wear to hide his hurts. He was impressed anew each time he saw them with the punishing power of such vengeance as was left to the Lord. He could see more than either of the pair before him. The little white-haired boy who had fought him with tooth and nail so long ago, to be not taken from Prudence, had now come back with the might of a man, even the might of a lover, to take her from him when she had become all of his life. He could think of no sharper revenge upon himself or his people. For this cowboy was the spirit incarnate of the oncoming East, thorned on by the Lord to avenge his Church’s crime. Day after day he would lie consuming the little substance left within him in an effort to save himself; to keep by him the child who had become his miser’s gold; to keep her respect above all, to have her think him a good man. Yet never a way would open. Here was the boy with the man’s might, and they were already lovers, for he knew too well the meaning of all those signs which they themselves but half understood. And he became more miserable day by day, for he saw clearly it was only his selfishness that made him suffer. He had met so many tests, and now he must fail at the last great sacrifice. Then in the night would come the terrors of the dark, the curses and groans of that always-dying thing behind him. And always now he would see the hand with the silver bracelet at the wrist, flaunting in his face the shivering strands of gold with the crimson patch at the end. Yet even this, because he could see it, was less fearful than the thing he could not see, the thing that crawled or lurched relentlessly behind him, with the snoring sound in its throat, the smell of warm blood and the horrible dripping of it, whose breath he could feel on his neck and whose nerveless hands sometimes fumbled weakly at his shoulder, as it strove to come in front of him. He sat sleepless in his chair with candles burning for three nights when Follett, late in August, went off to meet a messenger from one of his father’s wagon-trains which, he said, was on its way north. Fearful as was the meaning of his presence, he was inexpressibly glad when the Gentile returned to save him from the terrors of the night. And there was now a new goad of remorse. The evening before Follett’s return he had found Prudence in tears after a visit to the village. With a sudden great outrush of pity he had taken her in his arms to comfort her, feeling the selfishness strangely washed from his love, as the sobs convulsed her. “Come, come, child—tell your father what it is,” he had urged her, and when she became a little quiet she had told him. “Oh, Daddy dear—I’ve just heard such an awful thing, what they talk of me in Amalon, and of you and my mother—shameful!”