All that had gone before Isom threw his life away in that moment of blind anger, must be laid bare if he was to free himself of the shadow of suspicion. It was not the part of an honorable man to seek his own comfort and safety at the cost of a woman’s name, no matter how unworthy he knew her to be, while that name and fame still stood flawless before the world. In the absence of some other avenue to vindication, a gentleman must suffer in silence, even to death. It would be cruel, unjust, and hard to bear, but that was the only way. He wondered if Ollie understood.
But there were certain humiliations and indignities which a gentleman could not bend his neck to; and being led away by an inferior man like Sol Greening to be delivered up, just as if he thought that he might have run away if given an opening, was one of them. Sol had passed on through the open gate, which he had not stopped to close when he ran in, before he noticed that Joe was not following. He looked back. Joe was standing inside the fence, his arms folded across his chest.
“Come on here!” ordered Sol.
“No, I’m not going any farther with you, Sol,” said Joe quietly. “If there’s any arresting to be done, I guess I can do it myself.” 123
Greening was a self-important man in his small-bore way, who saw in this night’s tragedy fine material for increasing his consequence, at least temporarily, in that community. The first man on the bloody scene, the man to shut up the room for the coroner, the man to make the arrest and deliver the murderer to the constable–all within half an hour. It was a distinction which Greening did not feel like yielding.
“Come on here, I tell you!” he commanded again.
“If you want to get on your horse and go after Bill, I’ll wait right here till he comes,” said Joe; “but I’ll not go any farther with you. I didn’t shoot Isom, Sol, and you know it. If you don’t want to go after Bill, then I’ll go on over there alone and tell him what’s happened. If he wants to arrest me then, he can do it.”
Seeing that by this arrangement much of his glory would get away from him, Greening stepped forward and reached out his hand, as if to compel submission. Joe lifted his own hand to intercept it with warning gesture.
“No, don’t you touch me, Sol!” he cautioned.
Greening let his hand fall. He stepped back a pace, Joe’s subdued, calm warning penetrating his senses like the sound of a blow on an anvil. Last week this gangling strip of a youngster was nothing but a boy, fetching and carrying in Isom Chase’s barn-yard. Tonight, big and bony and broad-shouldered, he was a man, with the same outward gentleness over the iron inside of him as old Peter Newbolt before him; the same soft word in his mouth as his Kentucky father, who had, without oath or malediction, shot dead a Kansas Redleg, in the old days of border strife, for spitting on his boot.