She interrupted again. “What has Jack got against you that would make him be giving you away to Jim Lushing?”
“I told you a little while ago. I’m trying to wipe him and his man-traps off the map, and he doubtless knows it.”
“Jack Dargin would only be respecting you the more for that. Sure, it’s himself that knows how bad Powder Camp would be needing a cleaning up.”
“But, good heavens, girl! Dargin is the head and front of the lawlessness himself!”
“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie—and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.”
There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it.
“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if I have to. I was fool enough to go into that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next time——”
“’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.”
“What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night—Glory—and—God bless you!”
Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say, to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging itself.