When the two wags returned to the front street of Askatoon, they were just in time to see the second meeting of Orlando and Mazarine. Mazarine had not been able to find his horses at any hotel or livery stable, or in any street. It was at the moment, when, in his distraction, he had decided to walk back to Tralee, that Orlando, driving up the street, saw him. Orlando reined in his horses dropped from his buggy and approached him.
There was a look in Orlando’s eyes which was a reflection from a remote past, from ancestors who had settled their troubles with the first weapon and the best opportunity to their hands. “The furrin element in him,” as Jonas Billings called it, had been at full flood ever since he had bade his mother good-bye. A storm of anger had been raised in him. As he said to himself, he had had enough; he had been filled up to the chin by the Mazarine business; and his impulsive youth wanted to end it by some smashing act which would be sensational and decisive. So it was that Fate offered the opportunity, as he came up the front street of Askatoon, and found himself face to face with Mazarine, over against the offices of Burlingame.
“A word with you, Mr. Mazarine,” he said, with the air of a man who wants to ease his mind of its trouble by action. “Back there at the station, I kept my tongue and let you down easy enough, because my mother was present. She is old and sensitive, and she doesn’t like to see her son doing the dirty work every man must do some time or other, when there’s street cleaning to be done. Now, let me tell you this: you’ve slandered as good a girl, you’ve libelled as straight a wife, as the best man in the world ever had. You’ve made a public scandal of your private home. You’ve treated the pure thing as if it were the foul thing; and yet, you want to keep the pure thing that you treat like a foul thing, under your rawhide whip, because it’s young and beautiful and good. You don’t want to save her soul”—he pointed to the Bible, which the old man had snatched from his pocket again—“you don’t want to save her soul. You don’t care whether she’s happy in this world or the next; what you want is what you can see of her, for your life in this world only. You want—”
The old man interrupted him with a savage emotion which Jonas Billings said made him look like “a satyre.”
“I want to save her from the wrath to come,” he said. “This here holy Book gives me my rights. It says, ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and the trouble I have comes from you that’s stole my wife, that’s put her soul in jeopardy, robbed my home—”
“Robbed your home!” interjected Orlando quietly, but with a voice of suppressed passion. “Robbed your home! Why, the other day you tried to prevent her entering it. You wanted to shut her out. After she had lived with you all those years, you believed she lied to you when she told you the truth about that night on the prairie; but her innocence was proved by one who was there all the time, and for shame’s sake you had to let her in. But she couldn’t stand it. I don’t wonder. A lark wouldn’t be at home where a vulture roosted.”
“And so the lark flies away to the cuckoo,” snarled the old man, with flecks of froth gathering at the corners of his mouth; for the sight of this handsome, long-limbed youth enraged him.
“Give her back to me. You know where she is,” he persisted. “You’ve got her hid away. That’s why you’ve sent your mother East—so’s she wouldn’t know, though from what I see, I shouldn’t think it’d have made much difference to her.”
Exclamations broke from the crowd. It was the wild West. It was a country where, not twenty years before, men did justice upon men without the assistance of the law; and the West understood that the dark insult just uttered would in days not far gone have meant death. The onlookers exclaimed, and then became silent, because a subtle sense of tragedy suddenly smothered their voices. Upon the silence there broke a little giggling laugh. It came from lips that were one in paleness with a face grown stony.
“I ought to kill you,” Orlando said quietly after a moment, yet scarcely above a whisper. “I ought to kill you, Mazarine, but that would only be playing your game, for the law would get hold of me, and the girl that has left you would be sorrowful, for she knows I love her, though I never told her so. She’d be sorry to see the law get at me. She’s going to be mine some day, in the right way. I’m not going behind your back to say it; I’m announcing it to all and sundry. I never did a thing to her that couldn’t have been seen by all the world, and I never said a thing to her that couldn’t be heard by all the world; but I hope she’ll never go back to you. You’ve made a sewer for her to live in, not a home. As I said, I ought to kill you, but that would play your game, so I won’t, not now. But I tell you this, Mazarine: if I ever meet you again—and I’m sure to do so—and you don’t get off the road I’m travelling on, or the side-walk I’m walking on, when I meet you or when I pass you, I’ll let you have what’ll send you to hell, before you can wink twice.