Art regarded her fixedly. "Well, I don't see yet what's back of that first BECAUSE," he sparred. "There's nothing I can do to clear up anything."
"Art, don't lie to me about it. I know—"
"What do you know?" Art's eyes never left her face, now. They seemed to be boring into her brain. Jean began to feel a certain confusion. To be sure, she had never had any experience whatever with fugitive murderers; but no one would ever expect one to act like this. A little more, she thought resentfully, and he would be making her feel as if she were the guilty person. She straightened herself and stared back at him.
"I know you left because you—you didn't want to stay and face-things. I—I have felt as if I could kill you, almost, for what you have done. I—I don't see how you can SIT there and—and look at me that way." She stopped and braced herself. "I don't want to argue about it. I came here to make you go back and face things. It's—horrible—" She was thinking of her father then, and she could not go on.
"Jean, you're all wrong. I don't know what idea you've got, but you may as well get one or two things straight. Maybe you do feel like killing me; but I don't know what for. I haven't the slightest notion of going back; there's nothing I could clear up, if I did go."
Jean looked at him dumbly. She supposed she should have to force him to go, after all. Of course, you couldn't expect that a man who had committed a crime will admit it to the first questioner; you couldn't expect him to go back willingly and face the penalty. She would have to use her gun; perhaps even call on Lite, since Lite had followed her. She might have felt easier in her mind had she seen how Lite was standing just within the glass-paneled door behind the dimity curtain, listening to every word, and watching every expression on Art Osgood's face. Lite's hand, also, was close to his gun, to be perfectly sure of Jean's safety. But he had no intention of spoiling her feeling of independence if he could help it. He had lots of faith in Jean.
"What has cropped up, anyway?" Art asked her curiously, as if he had been puzzling over her reasons for being there. "I thought that affair was settled long ago, when it happened. I thought it was all straight sailing—"
"To send an innocent man to prison for it? Do you call that straight sailing?" Jean's eyes had in them now a flash of anger that steadied her.
"What innocent man?" Art threw away the stub of the splinter and sat up straight. "I never knew any innocent man—"
"Oh! You didn't know?"