“With the clothes on my back,” I asserted bitterly. “I’ve no desire to see Benton. The trunk can be shipped to me.”
She said on, in her cool impersonal tone.
“That is the easiest way. You will live warm and comfortably. You will need to wear no belt weapon. The police will protect you. If a man injures you, you can summon him at law and wash your hands of him. Instead of staking on your luck among new people, you can enter into business among your friends and win from them. You can marry the girl 264 next door—or even take the chance of the one across the street, her parentage being comme il faut. You can tell stories of your trip into the Far West; your children will love to hear of the rough mule-whacker trail—yes, you will have great tales but you will not mention that you killed a man who tried to kill you and then rode for a night with a strange woman alone at your stirrup. Perhaps you will venture to revisit these parts by steam train, and from the windows of your coach point out the places where you suffered those hardships and adventures from which you escaped by leaving them altogether. Your course is the safe course. By all means take it, Mr. Beeson, and have your trunk follow you.”
“That I shall do, madam,” I retorted. “The West and I have not agreed; and, I fear, never shall.”
“By honest confession, it has bested you; and in short order.”
“In short order, since you put it that way. Only a fool doesn’t know when to quit.”
“The greatest fool is the one who fools himself, in the quitting as in other matters. But you will have no regrets—except about Daniel, possibly.”
“None whatever, save the regret that I ever tried this country. I wish to God I had never seen it—I did not conceive that I should have to take a human life—should be forced to that—become like an outlaw in the night, riding for refuge——” And I choked passionately. 265
“You deserve much sympathy,” she remarked, in that even tone.
I lapsed into a turbulence of voiceless rage at myself, at her, at Daniel’s treachery, at all the train, at Benton, and again at this damning predicament wherein I had landed. When I was bound to wrest free after having done my utmost, she appeared to be twitting me because I would not submit to farther use by her. I certainly had the right to extricate myself in the only way left.