her say: “All the time I didn't know, Terry. I thought I was ashamed of the blood in you. But this girl opened my eyes. She told me the truth. The reason I took you in was because I loved that wild, fierce, gentle, terrible father of yours. If you have done a little of what he did, what does it matter? Nothing to me! Oh, Terry, nothing in the world to me! Except that Kate brought me to my senses in time—bless her—and now I have you back, dear boy!”
He remembered smiling faintly and happily at that. And he said before he slept: “It's a bit queer, isn't it, even two wise women can't show a man that he's a fool? It takes a bullet to turn the trick!”
But when he went to sleep, his head turned a little from Elizabeth toward Kate.
And the women raised their heads and looked at one another with filmy eyes. They both understood what that feeble gesture meant. It told much of the fine heart of Elizabeth—that she was able to smile at the girl and forgive her for having stolen again what she had restored.
It was the break-up of the Pollard gang, the sudden disaffection of their newest and most brilliant member. Joe himself was financed by Elizabeth Cornish and opened a small string of small-town hotels.
“Which is just another angle of the road business,” he often said, “except that the law works with you and not agin you.”
But he never quite recovered from the restoration of the Lewison money on which Elizabeth and Terry both insisted. Neither did Denver Pete. He left them in disgust and was never heard of again in those parts. And he always thereafter referred to Terry as “a promising kid gone to waste.”
