"I know you have. Why doesn't daddy come back?"
"He'll come soon enough. You're not afraid to be here alone with me, are you?"
"No; but anybody might be afraid of the man you are going to be."
His laugh was as mirthless as the creaking of a rusty door-hinge.
"You needn't put it in the future tense. I have already broken with whatever traditions there were left to break with. Last night I threatened to kill Allen, and, perhaps, I should have done it if he hadn't begged like a dog and dragged his wife and children into it."
"I know," she acquiesced, and again she was looking past him.
"And that isn't all. Yesterday, Kinzie set a trap for me and baited it with one of his clerks. For a little while it seemed as if the only way to spring the trap was for me to go after the clerk and put a bullet through him. It wasn't necessary, as it turned out, but if it had been——"
"Oh, you couldn't!" she broke in quickly. "I can't believe that of you!"
"You think I couldn't? Let me tell you of a thing that I have done. Night before last, in less than an hour after you sat and talked with me at the dam, Verda Richlander had a wire from a young fellow who wants to marry her. He had found out that she was here in Brewster, and the wire was to tell her that he was coming in that night on the delayed 'Flyer.' She asked me to meet him and tell him she had gone to bed. He is a miserable little wretch; a sort of sham reprobate; and she has never cared for him, except to keep him dangling with a lot of others. I told her I wouldn't meet him, and she knew very well that I couldn't meet him—and stay out of jail. Are you listening?"
"I'm trying to."