“Partner!” she repeated with an indescribable emphasis. “Pierre, I can't leave you.”
“Why?”
“I'm afraid to go: Let me stay!”
He said gloomily: “No good will come of it.”
“I'll never trouble you—never!”
“No, the bad luck comes on the people who are with me, but never on me. It's struck them all down, one by one; your turn is next, Jack. If I could leave the cross behind—”
He covered his face and groaned: “But I don't dare; I don't dare! I have to face McGurk. Jack, I hate myself for it, but I can't help it. I'm afraid of McGurk, afraid of that damned white face, that lowered, fluttering eyelid, that sneering mouth. Without the cross to bring me luck, how could I meet him? But while I keep the cross there's ruin and hell without end for everyone with me.”
She was white and shaking. She said: “I'm not afraid. I've one friend left; there's nothing else to care for.”
“So it's to be this way, Jack?”
“This way, and no other.”
“Partner, I'm glad. My God, Jack, what a man you would have made!”
Their hands met and clung together, and her head had drooped, perhaps in acquiescence.
CHAPTER 25
Dick Wilbur, telling Mary how Pierre had cut himself adrift, did not even pretend to sorrow, and she listened to him with her eyes fixed steadily on his own. As a matter of fact, she had shown neither hope nor excitement from the moment he came back to her and started to tell his message. But if she showed neither hope nor excitement for herself, surely she gave Dick still fewer grounds for any optimistic foresights.
So he finished gloomily: “And as far as I can make out, Pierre is right. There's some rotten bad luck that follows him. It may not be the cross—I don't suppose you believe in superstition like that, Miss Brown?”
She said: “It saved my life.”
“The cross?”
“Yes.”
“Then Pierre—you mean—you met before the dance—you mean—”
He was stammering so that he couldn't finish his thoughts, and she broke in: “If he will not come to me, then I must go to him.”
“Follow Pierre le Rouge?” queried Wilbur. “You're an optimist. But that's because you've never seen him ride. I consider it a good day's work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following and over- taking him—”
He laughed heartily at the thought.
And she smiled a little sadly, answering: “But I have the most boundless patience in the world. He may gallop all the way, but I will walk, and keep on walking, and reach him in the end.”
Her hands moved out as though testing their power, gripping at the air.
“Where will you go to hunt for him?”
“I don't know. But every evening, when I look out at the sunset hills, with the purple along the valleys, I think that he must be out there somewhere, going toward the highest ranges. If I were up in that country I know that I could find him.” “Never in a thousand years.”
“Why?”
“Because he's on the trail—”
“On the trail?”
“Of McGurk.”
She started.
“What is this man McGurk? I hear of him on all sides. If one of the men rides a bucking horse successfully, someone is sure to say: 'Who taught you what you know, Bud—McGurk?' And then the rest laugh. The other day a man was pointed out to me as an expert shot. 'Not as fast as McGurk,' it was said, 'but he shoots just as straight.' Finally I asked someone about McGurk. The only answer I received was: 'I hope you never find out what he is.' Tell me, what is McGurk?”
Wilbur considered the question gravely.
He said at last: “McGurk is—hell!”
He expanded his statement: “Think of a man who can ride anything that walks on four feet, who never misses with either a rifle or a revolver, who doesn't know the meaning of fear, and then imagine that man living by himself and fighting the rest of the world like a lone wolf. That's McGurk. He's never had a companion; he's never trusted any man. Perhaps that's why they say about him the same thing that they say about me.”
“What's that?”
“You will smile when you hear. They say that McGurk will lose out in the end on account of some woman.”
“And they say that of you?”
