“So you wanted my signature to come back to you under the words ‘In full to date.’ Is it in full to date? Well, we’ll part the better friends for my having come here. And you thought I could not forgive!”
“Yes!” the girl broke out at last. “I thought you were the hardest, coldest, cruelest man in all the world. I have seen only the savage side of you.”
His face changed, grew suddenly sad; upon it came the melancholy occasionally so notable on the face of another man of like trade, whom he had met not long before in the North.
“I don’t think you can quite understand everything in the world all at once, my dear,” said he. “I was set apart from men, because I had taken on work to do. Home and the love of woman could not be for me. I was nothing more than a priest—high priest of law and justice. My hands had to be red. I knew I could never come to you feeling that it was right.”
His face was gray, he undertook to smile, bitterly.
“I was a killer!” he exclaimed. “I became that out of duty to my family and my state. I knew what it meant—knew well enough. I couldn’t offer you a hand red as mine. I thought a time surely would come when you’d have a horror come over you, thinking of what I’d done. But I had to go on with my work until it was done. I studied it. I shot away a thousand pounds of lead, I used kegs of powder, in practice. And I studied concentration. That was the only way I could be safe. Of course, I can’t make you understand that. But I was playing in a game where I did not dare lose. My life was up all the time and more than my life.”
Now he was turning away.
“You are going?” said she.
“Yes. The last of the open gang of thieves and outlaws is dead to-day. The roads are open. The state can breathe. The great conspiracy is ended. We’ve done our work. For those who are to benefit by it, what difference if we do pass unknown and forgotten? Your father’s murderer is dead. We did what we had to do. That was what I did—I did that first, before I dared to think of beginning my own life for myself. But——” And now he drew himself up.
She knew that he wanted to indicate to her something. Her eyes rested on the whiteness of his linen. He saw the look.