"What else? To kill—never to stop killing—one after another until they are gone! Till Simon Turner and the whole Turner clan have paid the debts they owe."
Bruce recoiled as if from a blow. "Turner? Did you say Turner?" he asked hoarsely.
"Yes. That's the clan's name. I thought you knew."
There was an instant of strange truce. Both stood motionless. The scene no longer seemed part of the world that men have come to know in these latter years,—a land of cities and homes and peaceful twilights over quiet countrysides. The moon was still strange and white in the sky; the pines stood tall and dark and sad,—eternal emblems of the wilderness. The fire had burned down to a few lurid coals glowing in the gray ashes. No longer were these two children of civilization. Their passion had swept them back into the immeasurable past; they were simply human beings deep in the simplest of human passions. They trembled all over with it.
Bruce understood now his unprovoked attack on the little boy when he had been taken from the orphanage on trial. The boy had been named Turner, and the name had been enough to recall a great and terrible hatred that he had learned in earliest babyhood. The name now recalled it again; the truth stood clear at last. It was the key to all the mystery of his life; it stirred him more than all of Linda's words. In an instant all the tragedy of his babyhood was recalled,—the hushed talk between his parents, the oaths, the flames in their eyes, and finally the body he had found lying so still beneath the pines. It was always the Turners, the dread name that had filled his baby days with horror. He hadn't understood then. It had been blind hatred,—hatred without understanding or self-analysis.
As she watched, his mountain blood mounted to the ascendancy. A strange transformation came over him. The gentleness that he had acquired in his years of city life began to fall away from him. The mountains were claiming him again.
It was not a mental change alone. It was a thing to be seen with the unaided eyes. His hand had swept through his hair, disturbing the part, and now the black locks dropped down on his forehead, almost to his eyes. The whole expression of his face seemed to change. His look of culture dropped from him; his eyes narrowed; he looked grotesquely out of place in his soft, well-tailored clothes.
But he was quite cold now. His passion was submerged under a steel exterior. His voice was cold and hard when he spoke.
"Then you and I are no relation whatever?"
"None."