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 Rawlins took the empty wallet from the drawer, handed it to her, silently. She took it, opened it, turned it with hopeless blankness, a stricken, sick look in her eyes. Rawlins unfolded the paper with Peck's writing on it, which, if he had signed under the threat of Peck's gun, would have made him homeless, displaying it at arm's length before her eyes.

"You see it isn't signed," he said, and folded it again, and put it in his pocket. "Here," he offered, pushing the pan of onions toward her with his foot, "take these away with you if you want them—they're seasoned with Peck's tears. You'll never see him again. He took the money you gave him to force on me at the point of his gun, and left. He was glad to go. I let him leave because he said, and I believed him, it would hurt you more to have him desert you than to have him killed."

Mrs. Peck turned to the door, went out, stood a little while looking around as if she expected to see Peck's vanishing figure at the top of the hills somewhere. Rawlins went out after her, wondering what the reaction would be. Violent, he believed, judging from the smothered fire which was so entirely buried under this load of guilt and inescapable scandalous disgrace that not a spark of it was to be seen in her eyes.

"You're to blame," she said, sorrowfully rather than vindictively; "you drove him away."

"No, you're the one that did it," he corrected her. "He's been waiting for his chance ever since you started to make a sheepman out of him, and you know it."

Somebody was coming in a wagon from the direction