His black imagination instantly conceived the worst that Louise might do.
It was not in him ever to have the decent alternative. He questioned the
half-breed woman closely; he savagely interrogated the Chinaman; and then
he declared that they lied to him, that they knew more than they said;
and when he was unable to bear it any longer, he mounted his horse and
galloped over to Slow Down Ranch. As he went, he kept swearing to himself
that Louise had flown thither; and anger made his brain malignant. He
could scarcely frame his words intelligibly when he arrived at Slow Down
Ranch.
There he was presently convinced that his worst suspicions were true, for
Orlando also had not returned. He saw it all. They had agreed to meet;
they had met; they had eloped and were gone! His beady eyes were those of
serpents watching for the instant to strike, and his words burst over the
head of Orlando's mother like shrapnel.
For once, however, the futile, fantastic mother rose higher than herself,
and declared that her son had never run away from, or with, anything in
his life; that he--Joel Mazarine--had never had anything worth her son's
running away with; and that her son, when he came back, would make him
ask forgiveness as he had never asked it of his God.
Indeed, the gaudy little lady stood in her doorway and chattered her
maledictions after him, as he rode back again towards Tralee muttering
curses which no class leader in the Methodist Church ought even to quote
for pious purposes.
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