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The morning was half gone when Shon McGann and Mary Callen stood beside their horses, ready to mount and go; for Mary had persisted that she could travel–joy makes such marvellous healing. When the moment of parting came, Pierre was not there. Mary whispered to her lover concerning this. The priest went to the door of the but and called him. He came out slowly.

“Pierre,” said Shon, “there’s a word to be said between us that had best be spoken now, though it’s not aisy. It’s little you or I will care to meet again in this world. There’s been credit given and debts paid by both of us since the hour when we first met; and it needs thinking to tell which is the debtor now, for deeds are hard to reckon; but, before God, I believe it’s meself;” and he turned and looked fondly at Mary Callen.

And Pierre replied: “Shon McGann, I make no reckoning close; but we will square all accounts here, as you say, and for the last time; for never again shall we meet, if it’s within my will or doing. But I say I am the debtor; and if I pay not here, there will come a time!” and he caught his shoulder as it shrunk in pain of his wound. He tapped the wound lightly, and said with irony: “This is my note of hand for my debt, Shon McGann. Eh, bien!”

Then he tossed his fingers indolently towards Shon, and turning his eyes slowly to Mary Callen, raised his hat in good-bye. She put out her hand impulsively to him, but Pierre, shaking his head, looked away. Shon put his hand gently on her arm. “No, no,” he said in a whisper, “there can be no touch of hands between us.”

And Pierre, looking up, added: “C’est vrai. That is the truth. You go–home. I got to hide. So–so.” And he turned and went into the hut.

The others set their faces northward, and Father Corraine walked beside Mary Callen’s horse, talking quietly of their future life, and speaking, as he would never speak again, of days in that green land of their birth. At length, upon a dividing swell of the prairie, he paused to say farewell.

Many times the two turned to see, and he was there, looking after them; his forehead bared to the clear inspiring wind, his grey hair blown back, his hands clasped. Before descending the trough of a great landwave, they turned for the last time, and saw him standing motionless, the one solitary being in all their wide horizon.

But outside the line of vision there sat a man in a prairie hut, whose eyes travelled over the valley of blue sky stretching away beyond the morning, whose face was pale and cold. For hours he sat unmoving, and when, at last, someone gently touched him on the shoulder, he only shook his head, and went on thinking. He was busy with the grim ledger of his life.