himself, and the hand that held the pipe lay forgotten on his knee.
"What have you to do with Haman?" she asked slowly, her eyes burning.

"I want safe him--I mus' give him free." He tapped his breast. "It is
hereto mak' him free." He still tapped his breast.

For a moment she stood frozen still, her face thin and drawn and white;
then suddenly the blood rushed back into her face, and a red storm raged
in her eyes.

She thought of the sister, younger than herself, whom Rube Haman had
married and driven to her grave within a year--the sweet Lucy, with the
name of her father's mother. Lucy had been all English in face and
tongue, a flower of the west, driven to darkness by this horse-dealing
brute, who, before he was arrested and tried for murder, was about to
marry Kate Wimper. Kate Wimper had stolen him from Lucy before Lucy's
first and only child was born, the child that could not survive the warm
mother-life withdrawn, and so had gone down the valley whither the
broken-hearted mother had fled. It was Kate Wimper, who, before that,
had waylaid the one man for whom she herself had ever cared, and drawn
him from her side by such attractions as she herself would keep for an
honest wife, if such she ever chanced to be. An honest wife she would
have been had Kate Wimper not crossed the straight path of her life. The
man she had loved was gone to his end also, reckless and hopeless, after
he had thrown away his chance of a lifetime with Loisette Alroyd. There
had been left behind this girl, to whom tragedy had come too young, who
drank humiliation with a heart as proud as ever straightly set its course
through crooked ways.

It had hurt her, twisted her nature a little, given a fountain of