“I give him his chance, ma’am.”
“His chance.” There was derision in her voice. “I have talked to some of the men about you. They say you are the cleverest of any man in this vicinity with a weapon. You deliberately planned to kill him!”
He rode on, silently, a glint of cold humor in his eyes. He might now have confounded her with the story of Masten’s connection with the affair, but he had no intention of telling her. Masten had struck the blow at him—Masten it must be, who would be struck back.
However, he was disturbed over her attitude. He did not want her to think that he had killed Pickett in pure wantonness, for he had not thought of shooting the man until Uncle Jepson had warned him.
“I’ve got to tell you this, ma’am,” he said, riding close to her. “One man’s life is as good as another’s in this country. But it ain’t any better. The law’s too far away to monkey with—law like you’re used to. The gun a man carries is the only law anyone here pays any attention to. Every man knows it. Nobody makes any mistakes about it, unless it’s when they don’t get their gun out quick enough. An’ that’s the man’s fault that pulls the gun. There ain’t no officials to do any guardin’ out here; you’ve got to do it yourself or it don’t get done. A man can’t take too many chances—an’ live to tell about it. When you know a man’s lookin’ for you, yearnin’ to perforate you, it’s just a question of who can shoot the quickest an’ the straightest. In the case of Pickett, I happened to be the one. It might have been Pickett. If he wasn’t as fast as me in slingin’ his gun, why, he oughtn’t to have taken no chance. He’d have been plumb safe if he’d have forgot all about his gun. I don’t reckon that I’d have pined away with sorrow if I hadn’t shot him.”
She was much impressed with his earnestness, and she looked quickly at him, nearly convinced. But again the memory of the tragic moment became vivid in her thoughts, and she shuddered.
“It’s too horrible to think of!” she declared.
“I reckon it’s no picnic,” he admitted. “I ain’t never been stuck on shootin’ men. I reckon I didn’t sleep a heap for three nights after I shot Pickett. I kept seein’ him, an’ pityin’ him. But I kept tellin’ myself that it had to be either him or me, an’ I kind of got over it. Pickett would have it, ma’am. When I turned my back to him I was hopin’ that he wouldn’t try to play dirt on me. Do you reckon he oughtn’t to have been made to tell you that he had been wrong in tacklin’ you? Why, ma’am, I kind of liked Pickett. He wasn’t all bad. He was one of them kind that’s easy led, an’ he wasn’t a heap responsible; he fell in with the wrong kind of men—men like Chavis. I’ve took a lot from Pickett.”
“You might have shown him in some other way that you liked him,” she said with unsmiling sarcasm. “It seems to me that men who go about thinking of shooting each other must have a great deal of the brute in them.”
“Meanin’ that they ain’t civilized, I reckon?”