“Very well,” she said calmly. She leaned back in her chair, looking at him, feeling a quick pulse of pity for him, for as she sat there and waited, saying nothing further, she saw a faint red steal into his cheeks. She knew that he had expected an invitation to join her on the porch; he was entitled to that courtesy because of her treatment of him on the occasion of his previous visit; and that when the invitation did not come he could not but feel deeply the embarrassment of the situation.
The faint glow died out of his face, and the lines of his lips grew a trifle more firm. This reception was not the one he had anticipated, but then there were moods into which people fell. She was subject to moods, too, for he remembered the night she had hurt her ankle—how she had “roasted” him. And his face grew long with an inward mirth. She would ask him to get off his horse, presently, and then he was going to tell her of his feelings on that night.
But she did not invite him to alight. On the contrary, she maintained a silence that was nearly severe. He divined that this mood was to continue and instead of getting off his pony he swung crossways in the saddle.
“We’ve got the cattle all out of the hills an’ the timber, an’ we’re workin’ down the crick toward here,” he told her. “There ain’t nothin’ unusual happened, except”—and here he paused for a brief instant—“that I had to shoot a man. It was Watt Kelso, from over Lazette way. I hired him two weeks before.”
“I heard of it,” she returned steadily, her voice expressionless.
“I hated like poison to do it. But I had no choice. He brought it on himself.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said flatly. She looked at him now with the first flash of emotion that she had allowed him to see. “If killing people is your trade, and you choose to persist in it, I don’t see how we are to stop you.”
He looked sharply at her, but his voice was low and even. “I don’t shoot folks for the fun of it, ma’am.”
“No?”—with scornful disbelief. “Well, I presume it doesn’t make much difference. Dead people wouldn’t appreciate the joke, anyway.”
His face was serious now, for he could see that she was deeply disturbed over the shooting.