"There'll be one left on my side, and that'll just balance your's. It's the one who patched up that truce—that truce what ain't been broke by any one of us, till now! But she's blind, an' maybe don't count for much!"
Ah, the blind sister! She had forgotten her. The blind sister; that physically helpless one whose spiritual strength had put into motion this big, hulking frame of purpose, with its absorbing brain, to square his shoulders before the world and succeed! A softness, a womanly tenderness, came knocking at the door of Jane's heart, but she would not hear. Dale looked down at her resentful face; but he felt no awe of her now—this was the kind he understood!
"The mountains are so full of Whitlys, that I never thought of placin' you as Bill's girl—I don't remember even knowin' that he had a girl! Why'd you take me in school?"
"How did I know who killed him!" she answered, in a hard, dry voice.
Intently they stood, staring deep into each other's eyes;—these two products of a feud whose bitterness had long outlived the cause which gave it birth. His face was not two feet away, and the pupils which clung now eagerly to her own were charged with a force that held her almost hypnotized. Through them she began to see another being, another soul, a transfigured man. Their dilations seemed to be drawing aside and again closing the curtains, letting her peep into the secrets behind his mobile face. Her cheeks were burning more furiously than ever, drying up the recent tears to faint, tell-tale stains; and her lips were parted, showing teeth still set with anger. But her eyes—those eyes which were seeing new things in him—they, by a dewy radiance she did not know was there, contradicted much of the storm and passion.
CHAPTER XXX
"I'LL PAY THE DEBT!"
After several minutes the transfigured man before her spoke again:
"I'll pay the debt," he said, in a low tone of finality. "I'll wait here till the sheriff comes. Up to now there hasn't been a force in all Gawd's world that could 've come 'tween me an' the things you're teachin'. I didn't care about Potter. He was in the way. I've got no sorrows about anythin' since that day I drew sights on yoh Pappy's head, an' now. Ruth said she an' I owed a debt to the State for what they'd done for her, an' we couldn't be beholden to it; so I was goin' to pay all that back by bein' the biggest man of my time, by goin' back in those mountains, just as Lincoln would a-done, an' bringin' my people out to light—by emancipatin' all of 'em from the ignorance that's been makin' 'em slaves! But I reckon the first payment comes to you. You've a right to it, an' I'll stay here till you get all the revenge you want!"