What he had passed through recently had burned out of him a
certain demand upon human ethics which had been almost callous in its
insistence, and while he believed that something very real and very
stern in the way of necessity had driven Mary Standish north, he was now
anxious to be given the privilege of gripping with any force of
circumstance that had turned against her. He wanted to know the truth,
yet he had dreaded the moment when the girl herself must tell it to him,
and the fact that Stampede had in some way discovered this truth, and
was about to make disclosure of it, was a tremendous lightening of the
situation.
"Go on," he said at last. "What do you know about Mary Standish?"
Stampede leaned over the table, a gleam of distress in his eyes. "It's
rotten. I know it. A man who backslides on a woman the way I'm goin' to
oughta be shot, and if it was anything else--_anything_--I'd keep it to
myself. But you've got to know. And you can't understand just how rotten
it is, either; you haven't ridden in a coach with her during a storm
that was blowing the Pacific outa bed, an' you haven't hit the trail
with her all the way from Chitina to the Range as I did. If you'd done
that, Alan, you'd feel like killing a man who said anything
against her."
"I'm not inquiring into your personal affairs," reminded Alan.
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