The Golden Woman

Beasley Melford was in a detestable mood. For one reason his miserable bar was empty of all customers, and, for another, he knew that he was responsible for the fact.

Had he any sense of humor, the absurdity of the thing must have forced itself upon him and possibly helped to improve his temper. But he had no humor, and so abandoned himself to the venomous temper that was practically the mainspring of his life.

He cursed his absent customers. He cursed the man, Curly Saunders. He cursed the girl whom the trouble had been about. But more than all he cursed himself for his own folly in permitting a desire to bait Joan Rest to interfere with his business.

In his restless mood he sought to occupy himself, and, nothing else offering, he cleared his rough counter of glasses, plunged them into a bucket of filthy water, and set them out to drain. Then he turned his attention to his two oil lamps. He snuffed them with his dirty fingers in a vain attempt to improve their miserable light. Then, seating himself upon his counter, he lit a cheap green cigar and prepared to wait.

"Damn 'em all anyway," he muttered comprehensively, and abandoned himself to watching the hands of a cheap alarm clock creeping on toward the hour of nine.

Apparently the soothing influence of his cigar changed the trend of his thoughts, for presently he began to smile in his own unpleasant way. He was reviewing the scene which his venom had inspired, and the possibilities of it--at the moment delayed, but not abandoned--gave him a peculiar sense of gratification.

He was thinking, too, of Joan Rest and some others. He was thinking of the day of her arrival in the camp, and the scene that had followed Buck's discovery of her. He could never forgive that scene, or those who took part in it. Buck, more surely than anybody else, he could never forgive. He had always hated Buck and his friend the Padre. They had been in a position to hand out benefits to the starving camp, and patronage was an intolerable insult to a man of his peculiar venom. The thought that he owed those men anything was anathema to him, for he knew in his heart that they despised him.

Since the day of Joan's coming he had pondered upon how he could pay Buck something of that which he owed him for the insult that still rankled. He had been called an "outlaw parson," and the truth of the appellation made the insult only the more maddening. Nothing else could have hurt the man so much as to remind him of the downfall which had reduced him to an "outlaw parson."