“Oh, it was fair enough fight. THEY'LL tell you that. And so would HE, I reckon—if he could. He was ugly and bedev'lin', but I didn't care to quo'll, and give him the go-by all the time. He kept on, followed me out of the shanty, drew, and fired twice. I”—he stopped and regarded his hat a moment as if it was a corroborating witness—“I—I closed with him—I had to—it was my only chance, and that ended it—and with his own revolver. I never drew mine.”
“I see,” said the Colonel, nodding, “clearly justifiable and honorable as regards the code. And you wish me to defend you?”
The stranger's gloomy expression of astonishment now turned to blank hopelessness.
“I knew you didn't understand,” he said, despairingly. “Why, all THAT was TWO YEARS AGO. It's all settled and done and gone. The jury found for me at the inquest. It ain't THAT I want to see you about. It's something arising out of it.”
“Ah,” said the Colonel, affably, “a vendetta, perhaps. Some friend or relation of his taken up the quarrel?”
The stranger looked abstractedly at Starbottle. “You think a relation might; or would feel in that sort of way?”
“Why, blank it all, sir,” said the Colonel, “nothing is more common. Why, in '52 one of my oldest friends, Doctor Byrne, of St. Jo, the seventh in a line from old General Byrne, of St. Louis, was killed, sir, by Pinkey Riggs, seventh in a line from Senator Riggs, of Kentucky. Original cause, sir, something about a d——d roasting ear, or a blank persimmon in 1832; forty-seven men wiped out in twenty years. Fact, sir.”
“It ain't that,” said the stranger, moving hesitatingly in his chair. “If it was anything of that sort I wouldn't mind,—it might bring matters to a wind-up, and I shouldn't have to come here and have this cursed talk with you.”
It was so evident that this frank and unaffected expression of some obscure disgust with his own present position had no other implication, that the Colonel did not except to it. Yet the man did not go on. He stopped and seemed lost in sombre contemplation of his hat.
The Colonel leaned back in his chair, fanned himself elegantly, wiped his forehead with a large pongee handkerchief, and looking at his companion, whose shadowed abstraction seemed to render him impervious to the heat, said:—