This she felt, and yet the feeling conveyed no real conviction to her mind. All she knew was that loathing and repulsion stirred her, until the thought revolted her that she was breathing the same air as one who could be capable of such vicious cruelty. But she struggled to stifle all outward sign. And though she was only partly successful she contrived to keep her words calm, even if her eyes, those windows of her simple girl's soul, would not submit to such control.
"I'm over fifty now, girl," Mercy finished up, in a low suppressed tone, husky with feeling, yet thrilling with a cruel triumph. "Over fifty, and, for the last twenty and more years of it, I have waited for this moment. I have waited with a patience you can never understand because you have never been made to suffer as I have. But I knew it would come. I have known it every day of those twenty years, because I have read it in that book in which I have read so many things which concern human life. I was robbed of life years and years ago. Yes, life. I have been a dead woman these twenty years. My life was gone when your father died, leaving you, another woman's child, in my hands. God in heaven! Sometimes I wonder why I did not strangle the wretched life out of you years ago--you, another woman's child, but yet with Charles Stanmore's blood in your veins. Perhaps it was because of that I spared your life. Perhaps it was because I read your fate, and knew you had to suffer, that I preferred my sister's child should reap the reward of her mother's crime--yes, crime. Perhaps it was that while Charles Stanmore lived my hopes and longings were still capable of fulfilment. But he is dead--dead years and years ago. And with his death my life went out too. Now there is only revenge. No, not revenge," she laughed, "justice to be dealt out. That justice it is my joy to see dispensed. That justice it is my joy to feel that my hand has brought its administering about.
"I have laid all the information necessary. I have a lawyer in Leeson Butte in communication with my man in New York. And--and the sheriff and his men will be here before daylight. Oh, yes, I can afford to tell you now that the work is accomplished. You shall have no opportunity of communicating with your friends. I shall not sleep to-night. Nor will you leave this house. There is a means of holding you here. A means which will never be far from my hand." She tapped the bosom of her dress significantly, and Joan understood that she had armed herself. "The arrest will be made while they are still sleeping in that old fort of theirs--and your young Buck will pay the penalty if he interferes. Yes, yes," she added, rubbing her lean, almost skeleton hands together in an access of satisfaction, "when you sip your coffee in the morning, my girl, your Buck's foster-father will be on his way to the jail from which he will only emerge for the comfort of an electric chair. I have endured twenty years of mental torture, but--I have not endured them in vain."