"Meaning, my dear boy, that I can't forget the black hatred in your eyes one day in the woods when I wrestled with that vengeance fire smouldering deep in your nature. You haven't forgotten that afternoon, have you? The day when you promised that until you came of age you would put aside the conviction that Saul Fulton was your man to kill?"
"I haven't forgotten it, sir."
As Boone answered, the older man thought that, if something in the blue pupils stood for any meaning, he might also have added that neither had he entirely conquered the bitterness of that earlier time. Then Boone went on slowly:
"I kept my word, but you wouldn't have me go so far in turning the other cheek as to let him kill me—by his own hand or that of a hireling—would you?"
The gray eyes of the tall soldier held both sternness and reminiscence, but the reminiscence was all for something that brought a painful train of thought. Those were eyes that seemed looking back on smoking ruin, and that sought out of disastrous experience, to sound a warning. Into Boone's mind flashed a couplet:
"The Emperor there in his box of state, looked grave as though he had just then seen
The red flags fly from the city gates—where his eagles of bronze had been."
At times, when McCalloway wore that cryptic expression, Boone burned with an eager curiosity to have the curtain lifted for him, and to be able to see just what life had once spelled for this extraordinary man. Now the veteran was speaking again with a carefully intoned voice:
"I would have you defend your life, aggressively and fully, but your honour no less jealously. I am no psychologist, but I have read that almost every man has some spot on his sanity that is like a blind spot on his eye. Into your blood, distilled through generations, came a spirit that made a veritable religion of vengeance. You have sought to modify that and to become an apostle of progress. Apparently you have succeeded."
He paused and cleared his throat, and Boone once more prompted him with an interrogative repetition:
"Apparently, sir?"