“Jimmie—Jimmie—who—who—?”
“No one,” he shouted fiercely—“by God”—she had never before heard him swear—“I tell you no one—on my honor as a Travis—no one! It has come to me of itself—I know it—I feel it.”
He was too excited to talk. He walked up and down the little room, his proud head lifted and his eyes ablaze.
“I know now why I love honesty, why I despise those common things beneath me—why I am not afraid—why I struck that boy as I did this morning—why—” he walked into the little shed room that was his own and came back with a long single barrel pistol in his hand and fondled it lovingly—“why all my life I have been able to shoot this as I have—”
He held in his hand a long, single barrel, rifle-bored duelling pistol—of the type used by gentlemen at the beginning of the century. Where he had got it she did not know, but always it had been his plaything.
“O Jimmie—you would not—” exclaimed the woman rising and reaching for it.
“Tush—” he said bitterly—“tush—that's the way Richard Travis talks, ain't it? Does not my very voice sound like his? No—but I expect you now, mother”—he said it softly—“tell me—tell me all about it.”
For a moment Margaret Adams was staggered. She only shook her head.
He looked at her cynically—then bitterly. A dangerous flash leaped into his eyes.
“Then, by God,” he cried fiercely, “this moment will I walk over to his house with this pistol in my hand and I will ask him. If he fails to tell me—damn him—I dare him—”