"You don't seem to be," Simon answered with reddening eyes. "You are."
"I have no intention of saying I'm sorry I didn't heed the threats you gave me before—and as to those I've heard to-night—they're not going to do you any good, either. It is true that you found me in the house you occupy in the dead of night—but it isn't your house to start with. What a man seizes by murder isn't his."
"What a man holds with a hard fist and his rifle—in these mountains—is his," Simon contradicted him.
"Besides, you got me here with a trick," Bruce went on without heeding him. "So don't pretend that any wickedness you do to-night was justified by my coming. You'll have to answer for it just the same."
Simon leaned forward in his chair. His dark eyes glowed in the lamplight. "I've heard such talk as that before," he said. "I expect your own father talked like that a few times himself."
The words seemed to strike straight home to the gathered Turners. The moment was breathless, weighted with suspense. All of them seemed straining in their chairs.
Bruce's head bowed, but the veins stood out beneath the short hair on his temples, and his lips trembled when he answered. "That was a greater wickedness than anything—anything you can do to-night. And you'll have to answer for it all the more."
He spoke the last sentence with a calm assurance. Though spoken softly, the words rang clear. But the answer of the evil-hearted man before him was only a laugh.
"And there's one thing more I want to make clear," Bruce went on in the strong voice of a man who had conquered his terror. And it was not because he did not realize his danger. He was in the hands of the Turners, and he knew that Simon had spoken certain words that, if for no other reason than his reputation with his followers, he would have to make good. Bruce knew that no moment of his life was ever fraught with greater peril. But the fact itself that there were no doors of escape open to him, and he was face to face with his destiny, steadied him all the more.
The boy that had been wakened in his bed at home by the ring of the 'phone bell had wholly vanished now. A man of the wild places had come instead, stern and courageous and unflinching.