"How did she take it?"
"Hard. Cried an' said as 'twas more'n she deserved at the little gal's hands. Blamed herself—dreadful cut up. Seems, too, as 'twasn't necessary, as she'd already mailed Mr. Man his walking-papers."
"Too late—now. It's done."
The Cougar looked awkwardly down upon him. Pity had been foreign to their rough comradeship; it was, indeed, nearest of kin to shame; the words of sympathy choked in his throat. "Come, come!" he presently growled. "Chipper up! 'Tain't any worse than it was."
A convulsion seized and shook the big body. "You don't know, Cougar. You don't know what it is—" He stopped, aghast at the sudden appalling change in the other. He had straightened from his crouch, and his eyes flared like blue, alcohol flames in his livid face. As at the touch of a secret spring, the man's fierce taciturnity raised, exposing the tortured soul behind.
"I—don't?" The whisper issued like a dry wind from drawn lips. "Me?—that saw my wife an' baby—" Though frontiersmen tell, shivering, of the horror he mentioned, no pen has been found callous enough to set it forth on paper. "God, man!" His arms snapped outward and his head fell forward in the attitude of the crucifixion.
"Cougar!" Bender grasped his shoulder. "Cougar! Cougar, man! I'd forgotten."
But as one in a trance the man went on: "It's always with me—through these years—day an' night. I'd have killed myself—long ago—on'y whenever I'd think of that, she'd come—sweet an' smiling—with a shake of her pretty head. She wouldn't let me do it." The thought of her smile seemed to calm him, and he continued, more quietly: "I never could make out why 'twas done to her. A sky-pilot tol' me onct as 'twas the will o' God, but I shocked him clean out of his boots.
"'I'll know on the Jedgment Day, will I?' I asks him. 'Shorely,' he answers, pat. 'An' I'll be close in to the great white throne you was talking about?' He nods. 'Then do you know what I'll do?' I asks him again. 'If I find out as how that God o' yourn ordered that done to my little gal, I'll stick a knife into Him an' turn it round.'
"At that he turned green an' tried to saddle the dirty business onto the devil. But, Lordy, he didn't know. She does, though, else she wouldn't come smiling. She knows; so I've allus reckoned as if she could bear her pain I can worry through to the end. There! there! I'm all right again. You didn't go to do it. An', after all, I don't know but that you are right. For while my gal's at peace, yourn has to live out her pain. It's puzzling—all of it. Now there's him. Where does he come in? What about him?"