"I didn't know that," her cheeks were flaming. "I hadn't heard about that!"
"Well, he did. Ask Bob! He yelled it from a field, an' shot his pistol in the air, and said he'd do it yet. Don't you reckon I knew this country warn't big enough for him an' the school?"
Her cheeks burned hotter with this added humiliation that he had intended, not chivalrously to defend her, but only to keep her for his own advancement.
He had never let go her hand, nor stopped the anguished moving of his body.
"I didn't want over much to kill him," he was again saying. "As I laid there behind a log, watchin' him foolin' around, I almost wanted to creep away. An' when he turned his back to go in the cabin, my finger'd hardly pull the trigger—it reminded me so much of that time I laid my sights on the back of old Bill Whitly's head—"
"What?" she screamed, springing back in a perfect agony of horror. "What?"
He stared at her, amazed and even frightened by this new, this terribly new, ring in her voice. She was raising her hands slowly to her throat, and shrinking away—shrinking back against the wall as though he were some loathsome thing upon which she had suddenly and unexpectedly come.
"What's the matter?" he cried, forgetting his own feelings in this new alarm.
"Did—you—kill—Bill—Whitly?"
"Yes," he answered, not understanding. "Why?"