Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 307, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1918 — A LOYAL LOVE. [ARTICLE]

A LOYAL LOVE.

By EDNA LEE WATSON.

(Copyright, 1917. Western Newspaper Uates.) “They are yours, I believe?” “They are mine.” . 7 The man spoke with steely cold precision. There was a sneer in his tones, a menace in his evil eyes. She njet his fierce glance with unwavering mien, with a diffidence and contempt that stung him to the quick—and she the bride of a month! “I congratulate you on your powers of deceit,” he almost hissed. Adrienne Mercer raised herself to her full height “If you have discovered what you might have known, what the world could have-told you long ago, that I loved .the man who gave me these trifles before I met you, it is no revelation of deceit I know not what baleful power you held over my poor'father, dead but a week, that he drove me to wed you, because you forced him to do so. I never feigned to even respect you.” “ A model wife, truly!” grated Judge Rolfe Mercer harshly. “I am not that to you; I never will be," she returned clearly. He could have struck that fair face in his mad rage. He could have killed Vance Orton, had he stood before him. “Have a care!” he uttered through his set teeth. “I shall remember this fond lover of yours!” “He never was that. No word save of friendship ever passed between us, yet I glory in saying that he had my whole heart, and never knew.” She replaced the pretty fan, a little cluster of shriveled roses, a photograph. some invitation notes, the dead record of the one bright passage in her girlhood life, in her writing desk, whence the probing hand of her hueband had unearthed them. He came home a day later, flushed with drink and triumph. “When you read the evening paper,” he pronounced in even, but malicefreighted tones, “and recognize the sudden downfall of your idol and sole pattern of perfect manhood, Vance Orton, you will perhaps comprehend that. I have not boasted vainly of my power.” Adrienne read the account of the descent on a gambling house while its inmates wer« engaged in a riotous fracas. There was the name of the matt she loved. The judge before whom he and others had been brought had,, sentenced three of them, Including, Orton, to six months in the city bridewell. . * 'X . Adrienne then comprehended the full, despicable meanness of the man she had wedded. Before the week was out she had summarily left him. She had means of Jher own and sought a distant seclusion. Then began the downward descent of Rolfe Mercer, mercenary judge and crooked politician. He was ousted from his judidal position for accepting a bribe. Lower and lower he sank, fortune.and influence gone, until he became a common drunkard and vagabond. Vance Orton, after his unjust sentence, left the city and began a new life in a border town in Utah. He was a natural leader among men, and became such in the community. He was mayor, judge, and friend of everybody, and idolized by the rough miners of the district for his fairness.” One day a ragged, bloated, terrified wretch was brought before him, protected from the vengeance of half a dozen halfbreeds who sought to get at him as he was brought into the courtroom. At once Orton recognised him. One of the Indians was shouting out the cause arrest. Rolfe Mercer had become a common thief and tramp, had visited the hut where his mother lived, had nearly choked her-to death, forcing from her the few coins she possessed. The prisoner cowered like the craven he wqp, as ,he recognized the man who had the power to retaliate in full for past injustice. Suddenly, however, the son of the Indian woman leaped»forward, a naked blade in his hand. Before the officers could prevent him he had plunged the knife into the side of Mercer, had leaped through an open windoy and was gone. “Care for the man in every way yon, can,” ordered Orton. “His wife was a friend of my friends in the long‘ago.” But Mercer was beyond the power at human aid. It was when he was .dead that an officer brought to Orton some papers found in his clothing. One of these was of peculiar interest to Orton. For the first time he knew that husband and wife had been parted for years. The document found was a letter addressed to a lawyer 4n a distant city. It told him that the writer, Mercer, was destitute and ill. The unseen mis- : sive pleaded with the lawyer to influence his client, his wife, to assist him In his extremity. “I am going East for a few weeks,” Orton told his secretary, the day after Mercer had beep decently buried- AR those years the remembrance of Adrienne had been vivid in his mindi He longed to see her once again. . His pretense for visiting the lawyer was that he wished to Inform Hrs. Mercer of her husband’s death. It was in the office of the lawyer that he learned of the separation of wife and husband, and knew that Adrienne had never swerved from her regard and esteem for himself. The next day she sent for him. Truth dwelt ln ; the hearts of both. Their paths joined once mqre, and the sunlight of an undying wve away all those dark shadows oftbe