“You think she knows everything?” he asked in a strange voice, for his tongue felt thick and heavy. “Everything. The game is up, and I wish I had died before I began it; died in the old hogshead where I slept when you found me,” Tom replied. He was shaking with cold, notwithstanding that drops of sweat were on his face and hands, and his hair was wet as if drenched with water. “It is an accursed business,” he went on rapidly, “and I am sorry I dragged you into it. I was never so bad as some might think and I did it less for gain than for the excitement of seeing half a dozen men cower before a little fellow like me and a pistol which half the time was not loaded. That was the case to-day with the revolver Inez picked up and held at my head before she pocketed it. You should have seen her when she bade me go before she shot me like a dog. I never loved her as I did at that moment when I knew I had lost her. Once on the road when she seemed about to fall from the saddle and I tried to help her she threatened to shoot me again, reminding me that my revolver was in her pocket. Do you remember how I used to stand on my head when anything sudden pleased me? Well, I felt like trying it again when I imagined Inez’s surprise to find the chambers empty if she tried to kill me. She said you had told her there was murder in her blood. Do you think that Dalton woman’s fingers were tingling to shoot me?” Tom was talking at random, scarcely knowing what he was saying. But it did not matter. Mark was not listening to him. He had heard all he cared to know and was wondering how he could meet Inez and what she would say to him. He knew she had gone to her room, but could hear no sound of her moving. Once the thought came to him, “Is she dead? Has the shock killed her as it did her mother?” and he started to go to her. Then as he heard the opening of a window he resumed his seat. Outside, the bay mare had been patiently standing waiting to be cared for, and at last, as the care did not come, neighing loudly and pawing on the ground. Mark heard her and rising mechanically went out to her, glad of something to do, which would for a few moments divert his mind from himself. Over the mare’s stall a halter was hanging, and Mark looked at it attentively and tested its strength and wondered if it would hold him and how he would look dangling there, and if his feet would not touch the floor and so defeat his purpose. Satan was tempting him terribly and might have won the victory if there had not come to him a second time that day thoughts of Ridgefield and the old man who had loved and trusted him, and who, he had no doubt, had prayed for him when he supposed him still alive. The north piazza of the Prospect House, with Craig and Alice and Helen and the pleasant hours spent there came up before him and brought the tears to his hot eyes, cooling and healing and driving the tempter away.