giving up her baby, but when that came she was seized with a
thousand dreads, and made me swear by my love for her, which was and
is the holiest thing in all my life, that if anything happened I
would live for the other Merridy. I begged her again to come with
me, but her fears held her back. She vowed, however, that Bennett
should never touch her again, and I made her swear by her love for
the babe that she would die before he ever laid hands on her. It
woke a savage joy in me to think I had bested him, after all.

"I never thought of what I was giving up, of the clean name I was
soiling, of the mine back there that meant a fortune anytime I cared
to take it, for things like that don't count when a man's blood is
hot, so I rode away in the yellow moonlight with a sleeping baby on
my breast, where no child or woman had ever lain except for that
minute before I left. She stood out from beneath the porch shadow
and smiled her good-bye--the last I ever saw of her....

"I travelled hard that night and swapped horses at daylight; then,
leaving the wild country behind, I came into a region I didn't know,
and found a Mexican woman who tended the child for me, for I was
close by the place where Merridy was to come. Every night I went
into the village in hopes that some word had arrived, and I waited
patiently for a week. Then I got the blow. I heard it from the
loafers around the little post-office first, but it dazed me so I
wouldn't believe it till I borrowed the paper and read the whole
story, with the type dancing and leaping before me. It took some
hours for it to seep in, even after that, and for years I recalled
every word of the damned lie as if it had been branded on me with
hot irons. They called it a shocking crime, the most brutal murder
California had ever known, and in the head-lines was my name in