Orlando did not move as he spoke, but there was a look in his face which an enemy would not care to see. Mazarine, in spite of his rage, quailed before the sharp, menacing voice so little in tune with its reputation for giggling, and stepping back, he let Louise pass. Then he plunged forward out of the doorway.
“That’s right. Come outside,” said Orlando scornfully. “Come out into the open.” His voice became lower. There was something deadly in it, boy as he was. “Come out, you hypocrite, and listen to what I’ve got to say. Listen to the truth I’ve got to tell you. If you don’t listen, I’ll horsewhip you, that’d horsewhip a woman, till you can’t stand—you loathsome old dog.... Yes, he took his horsewhip to her yesterday,” he added to the spectators, who muttered angrily, for the West is chivalrous towards women.
Something near to madness possessed Orlando. No one had ever seen him as he was at that moment. Down through generations had come to him some iron thing that suddenly revealed itself in him, as something had just suddenly revealed itself in Louise.
The other three men—two in the wagon and one beside his horse-stared at him as though they had seen him for the first time. They were unready for the passion that possessed him. Not a muscle of his body appeared to move; he was as motionless as the trunk of a tree. But in his eyes and his voice there was, as one of the ranchers said afterwards, “Hell—and then some more.”
“Listen to me,” he said again, and his voice was low and husky now. “Yesterday I was broncho-busting—”
Thereupon he told the whole story of what had happened since he had seen Louise thrown from her chestnut on the prairie. He told how Louise was too shaken and ill to attempt the journey back to Tralee, and how they had camped where they were, near the dead horse.
As Orlando talked, the old man was seized by terrible hatred and jealousy. “You needn’t tell me the rest,” he broke in, his hands savagely opening and shutting. “I guess I understand everything.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth when from the wagon a man said: “Wait—wait, Mister. I got something to say.”
He sprang to the ground, and ran between Mazarine and Orlando.
“This is where I come in,” he said, as Louise’s face appeared at an upper window, and she listened. “You don’t know me. Well, I know you. Everybody knows you, and nobody likes you. I know what happened last night. I’m a brother of your fellow Christian Rigby, the druggist, over there in Askatoon. He’s a Methodist. I’m not. I’m only good. I been a lot o’ things, and nothing in the end. Well, you hearken to my tale.