A moment Chadron’s arm hung stiffly in that half-finished movement, while his eyes gave defiance. He had not bent before any man in many a year of growing power. But there was no other way; it was either bend or break, and the break would be beyond repair.
Chadron’s fingers were damp with sudden sweat as he unclasped them from the pistol-butt and let the weapon fall; sweat was on his forehead, and a heaviness on his chest as if a man sat on him. He felt backwards through the open door with one foot, like an old man distrustful of his limbs, and steadied himself with his shoulder against the jamb, for there was a trembling in his knees. He knew that he had saved himself from the drop into eternal inconsequence by the shading of a second, for there was death in dusty Alan Macdonald’s face. The escape left Chadron shaken, like a man who has held himself away from death by his finger-ends at the lip of a ledge.
“I knowed you’d git me, Macdonald,” Thorn repeated. “You don’t need no handcuffs nor nothin’ for me. I’ll go along with you as gentle as a fish.”
Macdonald indicated that Thorn might lower his 117 arms, having taken possession of the rifle. “Have you got a horse?” he asked.
Thorn said that he had one in the hotel stable. “But don’t you try to take me too fur, Macdonald,” he advised. “Chadron he’ll ride a streak to git his men together and try to take me away from you—I could see it in his eye when he went out of that door.”
Macdonald knew that Thorn had read Chadron’s intentions right. He nodded, to let him know that he understood the cattleman’s motives.
“Well, don’t you run me off to no private rope party, neither, Macdonald, for I can tell you things that many a man’d pay me big money to keep my mouth shut on.”
“You’ll have a chance, Thorn.”
“But I want it done in the right way, so’s I’ll git the credit and the fame.”
Macdonald was surprised to find this man, whose infamous career had branded him as the arch-monster of modern times, so vain and garrulous. He could account for it by no other hypothesis than that much killing had indurated the warped mind of the slayer until the taking of a human life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man, only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his atrophied small understanding.