White Bluffs spokesman. [volume] (White Bluffs, Wash.) 1907-1938, 1931-03-19
CHAPTER VI-Continued

JeemS scarcely knew he spoke the
words. They rang back through the
years as If ghost had come to life
whose memory they had flayed out Of
their hearts long time ago.
"What are you doing here?" she
demanded.
She might have asked that same
question In those unimportant years
when he had dared to visit Tonteur
manor with his foolish gifts. Why
was he here? He turned in the direc-
ton from which he had come and
held out his hand, not for her to take,
but as voice. She understood what
his burden had been. Tears? Such
trivial things could not exist in the
after-heat of the holocaust that had
consumed them. Pride, defying grief,
raised her chin little as she obeyed
Jeems. She knew to what she was
going. And when she came to the
place which Jeems had prepared, she
was like white angel who had ap-
upon the dead.
With a tool he had found, Jeems
had made q grave. It was shallow
and made less unbeautifuI with bed
Of golden grass. Tonteur did not seem
unhappy as he lay upon it. The top
of his head was covered so Toinette
could not see. She knelt and prayed
and Jeems drew back, feeling that to
kneel with her, with the marks of her
hatred on his face and body, would be
sacrilege.
Even now, when 1t should have
known better, the mill wheel continued
to whine and scream, and suddenly it
occurred to Jeems that it could not
have been that way yesterday when
Tonteur was alive. A devil must have
come to abide at the top Of the mill
He waited, scanning the horizons
that were thinning Of their smoke.
Death had passed and death might re
turn over its own blackened trail.
Toinette, beside her father, made him
think of that. 1t seemed a long time
before she rose to face him. She was
not crying. Her eyes were blue stars
in countenance as pale as marble.
The sun shone on her and gave an
unearthly radiance to her hair. Her
beauty held him stricken just as his
own terribleness forced from her a
gasp of protest when he drew off the
coat borrowed from one of the dead
men and spread 1t over Tonteur. But
she did not speak. Only the mill wheel
continued it's virulent plant as the
loose earth fell on the baron. Toinette
looked steadily toward the sky, and
when Jeems was done she accom-
panied him back to the mill. She
watched him go for his bow, where he
saw that the form he had thought was
Toinette was the wife Of Peter the
Younger.
He came back and spoke to her
second time. The lips she had broken
with the musket barrel were swollen,
and the brand across his forehead was
turning dark and angry color. The
cloth he had twisted about his wound
ed arm was red. Sickness and pain
were forcing their way into his eyes.
II must take you away" he said.
'"There is not time to care for the
others. If they come back
"They will not harm you" she said
Jeems made no answer but looked
away over the Richelieu toward Cham
plain and Dieskau.
"And they will not harm your father
or your mother or anything that be-
longs to the Bulains, but will reward
them for their loyalty to murder and
outrage. Is not that true?"
Still Jeems did not answer, but
stood listening for sound to come out
Of the distance.
She saw the sickness gathering in
bis face and eyes, but pity for him
was as dead in her breast as her de-
sire to live. She knew where he would
take her. To his home-a place left
unscathed by the killers. To his
mother, the soft and pretty woman in
whom her father had believed so faith
fully. To Henri Bulain, the traitor,