“Oh!” said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face was white and cold. “Did he—did he—kill anybody here?”
“He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother’s eyes!”
Tom Lassiter’s guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road ahead of him.
“Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!”
“He was a little tow-headed feller, and he had his mother’s eyes, as blue as robins’ eggs,” said Tom, his reminiscent sorrow so poignant that tears sprung to her eyes in sympathy and plashed down unheeded 178 and unchecked. “He’d ’a’ been fifteen in November. Talkin’ about fightin’, ma’am, that’s the way some people fights.”
“I’m sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter,” she confessed, hanging her head like a corrected child.
“He can’t hear you now,” said Tom.
They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever mentioned in Chadron’s home.
“No,” said Tom, when she mentioned that, “it ain’t the kind of news the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin’ our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers, and come ridin’ up to swipe us out. Well, they’s goin’ to be a change.”
“But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the horrible creature turn against him?” she asked, doubt and suspicion grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter’s tale.