“I know whose life you mean.”
“You know nothing about what I mean.”
“I know better than you know yourself. If I believed you, I shouldn’t respect you. Fear and mercy are two different things. If I thought you were only afraid of me, I shouldn’t think much of your aid. Listen––I never took the life of any man except to defend my own–––”
“No murderer that ever took anybody’s life in this country ever said anything but that.”
“Don’t class me with murderers.”
“You are known from one end of the country to the other as a gunman.”
He answered impassively: “Did these men who 190 call me a gunman ever tell you why I’m one?” She seemed in too hostile a mood to answer. “I guess not,” he went on. “Let me tell you now. The next time you hear me called a gunman you can tell them.”
“I won’t listen,” she exclaimed, restive.
“Yes, you will listen,” he said quietly; “you shall hear every word. My father brought sheep into the Peace River country. The cattlemen picked on him to make an example of. He went out, unarmed, one night to take care of the horses. My mother heard two shots. He didn’t come back. She went to look for him. He was lying under the corral gate with a hole smashed through his jaw by a rifle-bullet that tore his head half off.” De Spain did not raise his voice nor did he hasten his words. “I was born one night six months after that,” he continued. “My mother died that night. When a neighbor’s wife took me from her arm and wrapped me in a blanket, she saw I carried the face of my father as my mother had seen it the night he was murdered. That,” he said, “is what made me a ‘gunman.’ Not whiskey––not women––not cards––just what you’ve heard. And I’ll tell you something else you may tell the men that call me a gunman. The man that shot down my father at his corral gate I haven’t found yet. I 191 expect to find him. For ten years I’ve been getting ready to find him. He is here––in these mountains. I don’t even know his name. But if I live, I’ll find him. And when I do, I’ll tear open his head with a soft bullet in the way he tore my father’s open. After I get through with that man”––he hesitated––“they may call me whatever they like.”
The faint ghostliness of the coming day, writing its warning in the eastern sky, the bitter chill of the dying night, the slow, hard, impassive utterance, the darkness in which she stood listening to an enemy she could not see, the loneliness and danger of her situation combined to impress on the unwilling listener the picture of the murder, the tragic birth, and the mother’s death. “You want me out of the Gap,” de Spain concluded, his voice unchanged. “I want to get out. Come back, once more, in the daytime. I will see what I can do with my foot by that time.” He paused. “Will you come?”