Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/260



T SEEMED to Alma that some appalling cataclysm had overwhelmed the world. An hour ago she could not have been convinced that Nearing was a man so base as he had shown himself in that room, where his words seemed to sound still in repetition of his craven, unmanly demand. His attempt on Barrett's life had done no more than weaken in a slight degree her belief in the man who had stood in her veneration equal to a father for so many years.

She always had excused Nearing in her conscience; she always had held him the innocent victim of crafty contriving. She even could have justified him in taking a man's life, under stress of desperation, weariness and goading, to protect his name from the public disgrace that might grow out of some ill-advised act of the past. But his cruel cowardice of this night convicted him. He stood revealed, loathsome in his degradation.

Whatever he had done must have been independent of any connection with Findlay, to give that saturnine devil such a grip upon him. The crimes of the range were not so diversified as those of more civilized places; theft, arson, murder, covered them, as far as men counted them grave enough for punishment. It had come to the point now where passive submission to robbery no longer satisfied the master demon of this ridden coward's mind.