He would search no
longer. No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his
hiding-place, wherever it was. Why had the Chinamen come? What were
they after? It did not matter for the moment. What he wanted was
Louise, his bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from
him. Where would she go? Where, but to Slow Down Ranch? Where, but to
her lover, the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with
the ring on his finger and the Cupid mouth! Where would she go but to
the man with whom she had spent the night on the prairie!
Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had
conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception. Even
the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like
two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.
A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and
clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was
his passion. He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room,
where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his great-
grandfather.
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