Steele briefly spoke of his new work there, of the magnitude of the project and the desire he had had that his father might be with him.
“I’m proud of you,” his father said. “God knows I have not been the parent I would or should have been.”
“It’s enough for me if your heart’s easy now.”
“I feel as if I were gaining peace at last and––and I must speak. In San Mateo––ah, Steele, you will hear of me there,––you may have to fight the damning influence of my name and past, but I know now you’ll come through it. And all I pray for is that you can retain a little love for me despite everything.”
“Whatever it is I shall hear of my father, I should rather hear it from his lips than from strangers’.”
The hand in his closed spasmodically. For a long time nothing was said, and the only sound in the room was the ticking of the tin clock on the shelf busily measuring off the seconds of the old man’s failing span. To Steele it was as if his father was slowly summoning 310 the few remaining shreds of his fortitude to reveal the cancer of his past.
“I’m a branded murderer,” he said at last, gasping.
“But you never killed a man out of mere wanton desire to slay,” Steele responded firmly. “I too have killed men in fights in Mexico. That fact doesn’t weight my mind.”
“In the line of your duty, in the line of your duty. But I was drunk. He was a friend. When I became sober, I saw him with a bullet hole in his head.”
“Do you remember nothing of shooting him?”