by Alan Lemay
Jody's voice was very quiet, yet it must have seemed to Bill Roper that she cried out. "You're going to leave me to carry all this, just by myself?"
"Lew Gordon left a sound organization," Bill Roper said, his voice dead. "You have many men, and good men, too. The works will roll, I think, with Thorpe gone."
Once more the long, strangely poignant silence. And to Jody it seemed a terrible thing that what they both wanted was the same thing, and that yet the smoky years somehow managed to stand between.
Jody Gordon turned away from Bill Roper, and faced Dusty King's cross. She sat her saddle very straight before that cross, clean-limbed and slender, and there was something in her face that was enduring. It was the face of a woman who turned to the future without trace of doubt or fear; and she was the loveliest thing that Bill Roper would ever see...
"Jody," Bill Roper said uncertainly, "I want to tell you something. Other men will have to fight other wars; but my part of all that is finished. I'm not sorry my gun is hung up. I hope it's hung up forever. Once I thought that when Thorpe was smashed, my work would be through but now I see it's only begun. I think we're going to build something pretty fine, if you'll stay by me."
Jody smiled a little. Without taking her eyes from the cross she reached her hand toward him, and took his.
"All the anger and the hate has gone out of me," Roper said; "and if you can only some day understand that my riding with the wild bunch was was what I had to do-"
He fumbled for words, and stopped.
"Give me your knife," Jody said.
"My my what?"
She turned, and herself drew his skinning knife from the sheath at his belt. Then she stepped to the ground.
"In Justice," Jody said; "in justice, and in memory of courage."
With her own hands she cut the third notch upon the cross, deep and clean.