"On the contrary, he would not want me."
"And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?"
There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact that was stabbing him.
"No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But—but I half promised," he added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable."
The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded to thrust it back into the furnace.
"Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you call it, out of you?"
Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face.
"No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!"
He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary on the pass was in his eyes.
"But the thing that I cannot help—the transcendent thing, not of logic, not of Little Rivers' difficulties—how am I to give that up?" he cried.