Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer. "You ain't extending too much grace to a sinner."
"Any less than you extended her? What d' you expect of me that saw her name dragged in the mud, herself insulted—that took a life to save her body from violence? G—d d— you!" His pent-up feelings exploded, and for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter's remissness.
"Part of what you say being true, we'll pass the rest," the latter said, when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath. "Now—without conceding your right to withhold her address—will you forward some money?"
Glaves stared. He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least; nay, had lusted for it. But he was too much of a man himself to mistake a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his anger by switching his ideas. Jealous for her honor, he looked his suspicion. "Whose money?" But if accent and tone declared against the acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had owned in common—took them, that is, with a proviso.
"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar denomination. "You'd forty head of stock when Morrill died. Five hundred covers her share. Take these back." And to further argument he sternly answered, "I don't allow that she's looking for any presents from you."
"No, I don't allow that she is."
Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel eyes. "If it had been myself—" he muttered; then as Helen's parting smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!" But this was not the end. Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner, he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by some association of ideas remembered Carter's hand and wondered why it was bandaged. And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised almost to the dimension of regret.
Since the charivari, Glaves's opinion of the remittance-man—as a fighting animal, at least—had risen above zero, and he lent first an indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys' story. As he himself had prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his hiding, but the latter's evil fate arranged matters so that as he descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp, Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other. The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the other, in eager interruptions.
"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore. "You never saw such a fight!"
"No preliminaries," Poole declared. "Carter just leaped from his buggy and went for him like a cat after a mouse."