“I’ve taken this one,” he laughed.
She looked at the blood on his hand, shudderingly. “Why,” she said; “there’s been violence! The fire, the blood on your hand, the record, your ride here—What does it mean?”
“It means that I’ve been denied my rights, and I’ve taken them. Is there any crime in that? Look here!” He took another step and stood looking down at her. “I’m not saying anything about Corrigan. You know what we think of each other, and we’ll fight it out, man to man. But the fact that a woman is engaged to one man doesn’t bar another man from the game. And I’m in this game to the finish. And even if I don’t get you I don’t want you to be mixed up in these schemes and plots—you’re too good a girl for that!”
“What do you mean?” She stiffened, looking scornfully at him, her chin held high, outraged innocence in her manner. His cold grin of frank disbelief roused her to furious indignation. What right had he to question her integrity to make such speeches to her after his disgraceful affair with Hester Harvey?
“I do not care to discuss the matter with you!” she said, her lips stiff.
“Ha, ha!” The bitter derision in his laugh made her blood riot with hatred. He walked toward the door and took up the rifle, dimly remembering she had used the same words to him once before, when he had met her as she had been riding toward Manti. Of course she wouldn’t discuss such a thing—he had been a blind fool to think she would. But it proved her guilt. Swinging the rifle under his arm, he opened the door, turned when on the threshold and bowed to her.
“I’m sorry I troubled you, Miss Benham,” he said. He essayed to turn, staggered, looked vacantly around the room, his lips in a queerly cold half-smile, and then without uttering a sound pitched forward, one shoulder against the door jamb, and slid slowly to his knees, where he rested, his head sinking limply to his chest. He heard the girl cry out sharply and he raised his head with an effort and smiled reassuringly at her, and when he felt her hands on his arm, trying to lift him, he laughed aloud in self-derision and got to his feet, hanging to the door jamb.
“I’m sorry, Miss Benham,” he mumbled. “I lost some blood, I suppose. Rotten luck, isn’t it. I shouldn’t have stopped.” He turned to go, lurched forward and would have fallen out of the door had not the girl seized and steadied him.
He did not resist when she dragged him into the room and closed the door, but he waved her away when she tried to take his arm and lead him toward the kitchen where, she insisted, she would prepare a stimulant and food for him. He tottered after her, tall and gaunt, his big, lithe figure strangely slack, his head rocking, the room whirling around him. He had held to the record and the rifle; the latter by the muzzle, dragging it after him, the record under his arm.
But his marvelous constitution, a result of his clean living and outdoor life, responded quickly to the stimulation of food and hot drinks, and in half an hour he got up, still a little weak, but with some color in his cheeks, and shame-facedly thanked the girl. He realized now, that he should not have come here; the past few hours loomed in his thoughts like a wild nightmare in which he had lost his sense of proportion, yielding to the elemental passions that had been aroused in his long, sleepless struggle, making him act upon impulses that he would have frowned contemptuously away in a normal frame of mind.