CHAPTER XXVI
MR. HORTON CAPITULATES
I had not been very polite to Mr. Horton before that morning, but when he made the abrupt declaration that he had made a fool of himself long enough, I was civil enough to refrain from contradicting him.
“I ain’t had no breakfast,” he went on, presently, glancing at his torn dress. “I’m a pretty tough-looking subject, too, I reckon.” Again I did not dispute the statement. Looking away from me, he took a step or two toward the spot where his horse awaited him, then turned resolutely back again. “Say, I’m going to own up while I’ve got courage to do it!” he exclaimed, speaking rapidly and with suppressed excitement: “I ain’t treated you and your folks right, Miss Leslie; I’ve knowed it all along; but, you see, I’d got my mind set on that bit of land that your father took up—not that I needed it, or anything of that kind—a claim would ’a’ been more bother than good to me as a general thing; but I’d said to folks that I meant to have it and I’d managed to get up a kind of ugly pride in showing folks that what I said went, whether or no.
“My wife—she’s a good woman—I do’no what she’d do if she was to know all that I’ve done or tried to do, but I reckon you know pretty well, Miss Leslie. Well, you’ve known Jake Horton as he was. I’m going to give you all a chance to know him as he is now. When a man undertakes to do a bit of spite work like this; work that he’s no call to feel proud of, and knows that so well that he tries to do it alone and in the dark, and is held back from making a consummate idiot of himself, and a criminal, too, like enough, by a dog and a young girl, it’s time to call a halt. That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to call a halt and travel a new trail from this on. I don’t ask you to believe anything that I say, Miss Leslie, there ain’t no reason at present why you should, but there will be!” He paused to moisten his dry lips. I looked up at him expectantly. “I’m going to do what’s right by you and yours, from this on,” he said, in answer to the look. Despite my past acquaintance with him I believed him, and indignantly strove to smother the tormenting little recollection that would keep obtruding itself—the recollection that, from the moment that the deed to the homestead was secured this man would be powerless to injure us, unless he did it openly and in ways that might be easily brought home to him, and it was now too late for him to do us any harm at the Land Office.
I am ashamed to be obliged to record that Mr. Horton’s declaration of a change in his feelings toward us, and his promises of better conduct toward us in the future were accompanied in my secret thought by such damaging reflections, but such was the case. The dictionary was under my arm and glancing down at it I said: “I would like to know, if you don’t mind, Mr. Horton, how this book—and you—came to be under the ruins of that shack?”
There was a big black and blue bruise on the back of Mr. Horton’s right hand, the hand that some weeks previously had been injured by an oak splinter, as he told his wife, on the night that I had fired at a man fleeing up the hillside. Looking attentively at the bruise, and not at all at me, Mr. Horton replied: