Sounds of dissent broke out round the circle. All the eyes were trained on him, some with a wide, expectant fixity, others bright with combative fire. Even Glen sat up, scratching his head, and remarking sotto voce to his wife:
"Ain't I always said he was an Indian?"
"But the Blackfeet chief wasn't the man who killed his father," said the doctor.
"No, he was chief of the tribe who did."
"But why kill an innocent man who probably had nothing to do with it?"
"It was for vengeance," said Zavier with unmoved patience and careful English. "Vengeance for his father's death."
Several pairs of eyes sought the ground giving up the problem. Others continued to gaze at him either with wonder, or hopeful of extracting from his face some clew to his involved and incomprehensible moral attitude. They suddenly felt as if he had confessed himself of an alien species, a creature as remote from them and their ideals as a dweller in the moon.
"He had waited long for vengeance," Zavier further explained, moving his glittering glance about the circle, "and if he could not find the right man, he must take such man as he could. The chief is the biggest man, and he comes where Godin has him. 'My father is avenged at last,' he says, and bang!"—Zavier levelled an imaginary engine of destruction at the shadows—"it is done and Godin gets the blanket."
The silence that greeted this was one of hopelessness; the blanket had added the final complication. It was impossible to make Zavier see, and this new development in what had seemed a boyish and light-hearted being, full to the brim with the milk of human kindness, was a thing to sink before in puzzled speechlessness. Courant tried to explain:
"You can't see it Zavier's way because it's a different way from yours. It comes out of the past when there weren't any laws, or you had to make 'em yourself. You've come from where the courthouse and the police take care of you, and if a feller kills your father, sees to it that he's caught and strung up. It's not your business to do it, and so you've got to thinking that the man that takes it into his own hands is a desperate kind of criminal. Out here in those days you wiped out such scores yourself or no one did. It seems to you that Godin did a pretty low down thing, but he thought he was doing the right thing for him. He'd had a wrong done him and he'd got to square it. And it didn't matter to him that the chief wasn't the man. Kill an Indian and it's the tribe's business to settle the account. The Blackfeet killed his father and it was Godin's business to kill a Blackfeet whenever he got the chance. I guess when he saw the chief riding out to meet him what he felt most was, that it was the best chance he'd ever get."