Page:Max Brand--The Seventh Man.djvu/109

Rh possible—but if you seen that with your own eyes, it's possible true. He's changed.”

“I've been almost afraid to be happy all these years,” she said, “but now I want to sing and cry at the same time. My heart is so full that it's overflowing, Buck.”

She brushed the tears away and smiled at them. “Tell me all about yourselves. Everything. You first, Lee. You've been longer away.”

He did not answer for a moment, but sat with his head fallen, watching her thoughtfully. Women had been the special curse in Lee Haines' life; they had driven him to the crime that sent him West into outlawry long years before; through women, as he himself foreboded, he would come at last to some sordid, petty end; but here sat the only one he had loved without question, without regret, purely and deeply, and as he watched her, more beautiful than she had been in her girlhood, it seemed, as he heard the fitful laughter of Joan outside, the old sorrow came storming up in him, and the sense of loss.

“What have I been doing?” he murmured at length. He shrugged away his last thoughts. “I drifted about for a while after the pardon came down from the governor. People knew me, you see, and what they knew about me didn't please them. Even today Jim Silent and Jim Silent's crew isn't forgotten. Then don't look at me like that, Kate; no, I played straight all the time—then I ran into Buck and he and I had tried each other out, we had at least one thing in com-