The Delafield Affair

by Florence Finch Kelly

Conrad folded the letter carefully, and put it in his pocket. He sat quite still, whispering “Aleck! Aleck Bancroft!” Presently his face went red again and starting up he hurried into the corral and threw the saddle again upon Brown Betty. Outside the gate, scarcely looking which way he went, he headed the mare toward Golden and galloped away, across the hills, and into the distance. He never knew just where or how far he rode that day. Afterward he remembered that sometimes he had galloped along a road and sometimes across the trackless plain, that sometimes he had found himself urging Betty to her utmost speed and again had traversed miles at a walk or had stood for a long time stock-still.

When he left the house the old idea that had enthralled him so long was clamoring in his heart. That may have been why, unconsciously, he rode at first down the road toward Golden. “It was not enough for him to take all my father had, life as well as money, and to make me drudge through my youth, but now he must set a hired killer upon me to stick me in the back!” So galloped his angry thought as Brown Betty’s hoofs sped over the ground toward Bancroft’s home. “Why didn’t he come out in the open like a man and tell me who he was, and let us fight it out on the square? To send a man to live under my roof, and hire him to rope me, or stick me, or shoot me from ambush! And to pretend to be my good friend all the time! Coward! Thief! Murderer!”

Then, somehow, through his seething mind, for the first time came the remembrance of Lucy, and quickly followed the idea that perhaps Bancroft had gone about it in this secret way to save her from all knowledge of his disgraceful past. He checked Brown Betty’s gallop to a walk. “He knew I was after him, hot-foot,” now ran Curtis’s thought, “and he sure had the right to head me off if he could. But he ought to have done it on the square!” He remembered the warnings Bancroft had given him about Gonzalez and about the danger of pursuing Delafield, and chuckled unmirthfully. “I reckon he was squaring himself to his own conscience,” he said aloud.

Conrad looked about him and saw that he was on the road to Golden. Then came the flashing idea that he was on his way to kill Lucy’s father. Instantly his feeling revolted. Whirling the mare’s head he struck off across the plain to the eastward and after some miles struck the road to Randall. By that time he was pondering painfully the matter of Lucy and Homer. That evening, without doubt, Homer would come home, proud and happy, and tell him that he and Lucy were engaged. And this would be his wedding present to the girl he loved and the brother he had cared for almost since babyhood—the dead body of her father!

Then came pelting back the memory of his own wrongs, and Brown Betty was sent scudding down the road as remembrance and habit again lashed his heart. He turned about and raced back along the road toward Golden, hot with the old memories and sore with the newly discovered duplicity of his friend. “Even if I don’t kill him,” he thought, “I’ll tell him what he is! I’ll throw his villainy and his cowardice in his face! I’ll tell him he’s a sneak and a coward, and to draw if he dares!” His imagination rushed on through the scene and showed him, at the end, Bancroft’s bleeding body at his feet.

With a shudder he wheeled the mare abruptly, turned from the road, and went galloping across the plain to the south. He began to understand that he could not kill Lucy’s father. A sudden bright recollection came to him of how she looked that Spring afternoon when she and Bancroft had stopped at the ranch; how she turned to him in the wind, holding her wide hat down beside her face, and said gayly, “I assure you, Mr. Conrad, the most superior quality of father to be found anywhere in the United States!” And Bancroft seemed as fond of her as she was of him. Yes; there was unusual love and devotion between them. Brown Betty was walking more slowly now; and after a while Curtis realized that she was standing still in the middle of the plain with the road nowhere in sight. And at the same time it was borne in upon him that he did not wish to kill Lucy’s father, that the idea had become repugnant to him.

He turned to seek the road, saying to himself, “What, then, shall I do?” The wish was still strong within him to make Delafield suffer punishment for his misdeeds, to make him atone by his own suffering for all that Conrad himself had suffered. There was still the law. “Homer said he would help me if I wanted to go at it that way,” thought Curtis. That recollection helped his self-justification for a moment, then his thoughts went on: “But of course he wouldn’t do anything of the sort now; and he wouldn’t want me to, either.” It occurred to him that such a course as that would bring to Lucy as much pain as would her father’s death. She was so proud of him and believed in him so thoroughly. “It would break her heart if she knew all this about his past,” he decided. Homer, too, how deeply hurt he would be to have Lucy’s father disgraced and Lucy herself made utterly wretched! “The lad would never forgive me,” he muttered. Presently he was telling himself that Lucy must never be made to suffer the shame and unhappiness of such a disclosure. Nor should Homer ever know the truth about Delafield’s identity. He must be able to love and respect his wife’s father.

With a loving smile Conrad recalled some of Lucy’s indignant remarks about Baxter’s dealings with the Mexicans of the Rio Grande valley, and saw again her winsome look as she tossed her curly head and her brown eyes sparkled. Then quickly came the self-questioning: What would she think of him if she knew the purpose that had been animating him all his life? Whether it was her father he had tracked or another, how horrified she would be if she knew she had made such a man her friend! He blushed crimson, and pricked the mare to a faster pace. The old longing for revenge, the old belief in the rightfulness of his course, the old sense of satisfaction in his purpose—it was all dying hard, but he had come to where he could see it as it looked to others. He began to feel ashamed.

Still, it was difficult to give up the feeling that Delafield should be made to suffer some sort of retaliation for the wrongs he had inflicted upon others. Conrad pondered it as he rode aimlessly about, still smarting under the thought of Bancroft’s deception during the last few months. He might go to the banker and have it all out by word of mouth. But as he considered that course with cool mind he reached a pretty firm conviction that shots from one or the other, or both, would end the interview. Bancroft was not likely to submit tamely to insult from him. And much shame and sorrow for Lucy and Homer would result. He did not want them to suffer. His head lifted and his lips tightened. “I’ll give up the whole thing before I’ll let it cloud their happiness,” he said aloud. Then he fell to thinking why Bancroft had tried to strike him down secretly.

“I reckon he was doing his best to head me off in a way that would save him from disclosure and prevent Lucy from knowing anything about it,” he thought. “Well, I can’t blame him for wanting to keep it dark, at this stage of the game. But—why didn’t he come and tell me, like a man!” Suddenly he began to recall the sort of things about Delafield and his own expectations that he had been accustomed to say to Bancroft, and smiled grimly.