"That is the reason; yes."
There was another little interval of silence and then she said: "I suppose you couldn't tell me—or anybody—could you?"
"I can tell you enough so that you will understand why I may not be permitted to go on and finish what I have begun in Timanyoni High Line. When I left home I thought I was a murderer."
He would not look at her to see how she was taking it, but he could not help hearing her little gasp.
"Oh!" she breathed; and then: "You say you 'thought.' Wasn't it so?"
"It happened not to be. The man didn't die. I suppose I might say that I didn't try to kill him; but that would hardly be true. At the moment, I didn't care. Have you ever felt that way?—you know what I mean, just utterly blind and reckless as to consequences?"
"I have a horrible temper, if that covers it."
"It's something like that," he conceded; "only, up to the moment when it happened I hadn't known that I had any temper. Perhaps I might say that the provocation was big enough, though the law won't say so."
The pink flush had faded out of the high western horizon and the stars were coming out one at a time. The colonel had come up from the ranch bunk-house where the men slept, and was smoking his long-stemmed corn-cob pipe on the lawn under the spreading cottonwoods. Peace was the key-note of the perfect summer night, and even for the man under the shadow of the law there was a quiet breathing space.
"I don't believe you could ever kill a man in cold blood," said the young woman in the hammock. "I'm sure you know that, yourself, and it ought to be a comfort to you."