“You always presume on obligations I never asked of you. But I can’t see—I don’t know——”
“You know I love you; that’s the thing I can’t help. You couldn’t help knowing it. I am the man who kissed you that night in the dark—yes, I did that. You knew! I won’t tell you why I was there that night, or why I am here now. Forget what happened the other day at the river—you’d as well. The woman who doubts me once is done with me forever.”
She could not speak to this new man, savage, impetuous, the chill all gone from him.
“Dare? I do dare! I dare tell you that there will never be any other woman in the world for me. I’ll never be even the last man in the world for you.”
Doubt, contrition, fear—a horrible fear that she had been cruelly unjust, a yet more terrible fear that he was going away—all mingled in the mind of the girl who heard him.
“I cannot possibly understand how you could come. I don’t know why you should. Always you put a load on me.” Her own voice had been more certain at other times.
His answer came very slowly.
“A man has an indefeasible right to tell the one woman in the world that he cares for her, even if he is going to the gallows. I might as well be on my way to the gallows, so far as any chance with you is concerned. Chance? Why, a chance with you? I’d not give myself one if I could. Look at my hands!”
He extended his hands, long, slender, well kept, so that she might see.
“I am a killer!” said Dan McMasters bitterly. “That’s what I have become for sake of Texas, for sake of the law, for sake of women and children, I suppose. But no woman or child for me! It’s worse to be a killer than it is to be killed. Well I know that. But I was mad that night. I just thought of what might have happened to you.”