Over the whole distance between the school-house and the solitary Three-mile he walked on, brooding and bitter. The action of the woman who turned from him when she first saw him after her arrival at Birralong, came to be viewed in a less charitable light than it was when he spoke of it to Ailleen. Then he said she turned away because she had learned she had wronged him; now in his thoughts he galled himself by attributing her action to fear and shame, and aggravated his sense of injury by recalling, again and again, that the man who had married her had kept for years the message she had sent on her deathbed. Disjointedly and incoherently, but always bitterly, he brooded and piled item on item, until there came to him the memory of the other, the memory of the woman who had first set his life awry.
A few kind sentences; a touch of human sympathy; a token of kindly impulse and generous open-heartedness at that moment when his better nature was stirred, and Slaughter might have forgotten in the warmth of the present the chill gloom of the past. But there was no one near him to give the necessary trend to the direction of his thoughts and emotions; nothing came to him save the recollection of the one whose jealous fancy had let loose all the hard cruelty of his nature; and Slaughter finished his walk with his mind seething in revengeful malice against the memory of the woman who had wrought his ruin.
He turned his horse into the paddock, force of habit impelling him to remove the saddle and bridle, the storm of his memory preventing him from even realizing that he did so. With the bridle on his arm, and the saddle under it, he walked to the hut and kicked the door open. On the threshold he stopped. Two men sat at the rough table in the middle of the room, and, as the door opened, the man with his back to the doorway turned in his seat and rose to his feet.
The saddle fell from Slaughter's arm, unnoticed; the presence of the second man was unrealized; for only could Slaughter stand and stare at the man who faced him—a man with a brutal head and black, heavy brows.
"You don't seem too pleased to see an old mate," he said, with something of a snarl in his voice.
"You!" Slaughter exclaimed.
"Yes, me; and why not?" replied the other, quickly and hotly.
"There's nothing between you and me—nothing," Slaughter said slowly.
"Is that so?" the man replied. "Well, I fancy I'm wrong, then, for I thought that the work Kate Blair had done was enough to make both of us learn——"
Slaughter started at the name, started forward, and then checked himself, though his face went hard and his hands clenched, and his eyes gleamed brighter than they did when he faced Marmot a few hours earlier. The man saw—and stopped.