Jim thought it best not to ask additional names.
“What was you wantin’?” Steve asked.
“Somebody’s playing hob with my machinery and driving spikes into my logs for me to rip off sawteeth on. I think Michael Moran is at the bottom of it, but I want to prove it to myself.”
“If you kin prove it—what?”
“I’ll have a better conscience to go after the man.”
“Not after him personal. You won’t lay hands on him? You hain’t figgerin’ on doin’ anythin’ to his body, be you? ’Cause I can’t have that. That hain’t your concern. It’s a job for somebody else.”
“No. But I’m going to drive him out of Diversity.”
Steve smiled. “If you was to take his money away from him and his power away from him, why I’d be glad. It ’u’d hurt him mighty bad. But I calc’late he hain’t goin’ to be drove out of Diversity. I figger he’s goin’ to stay here permanent—permanent as them in Diversity’s graveyard.”
Jim wondered if the man were not off the mental perpendicular; but a glance at his fine if stern face, his clear eyes, his bearing, argued strongly in favor of his sanity. Perhaps the man was possessed of some Old Testament spirit of vengeance; perhaps here was a Northern relative of the blood feud of the Kentucky mountains. In spite of himself he felt apprehensive for Moran’s sake.
“You want proofs, eh? Be you enured to walkin’?”