“Get out of here!” Gordon shouted in a sudden moving rage; “and stay out; don’t come back when you find what’s what.”
“I c’n do that. And I’ll point out to you we just came for Lettice, we never took nothing of yours. I only stopped now to warn you away ... I’ll hitch her up, Gordon; you get down the road.”
“It’s mine now, whose ever it was awhile back. I’ve paid for it. You go.”
Simeon Caley lingered reluctantly at the door. Gordon stood rigidly; his eyes were bright points of wrath, his arm rose, with a finger indicating the world without. The former slowly opened the door, stepped out upon the porch; he stayed a moment more, then closed himself from sight.
XVIII
The stir and heat of Sim’s presence died quickly away; the house was without a sound; General Jackson lay like an effigy in ravelled black and buff wool. Gordon assembled the scattered papers on the table into an orderly pile. He moved into the kitchen, abstractedly surveyed the familiar walls; he walked through the house to the sitting room, where he stood lost in thought:
The County was “mad clear through”; Sim, supposing him guilty, had warned him to escape, advised him to run away.... That had never been a habit of the Makimmons, he would not form it now, at the end. He was not considering the mere probability of being shot, but of the greater disaster that had already smashed the spring of his living. His sensibilities were deadened to any catastrophe of the flesh.
At the same time he was conscious of a mounting rage at being so gigantically misunderstood, and his anger mingled with a bitter contempt for Simeon Caley, for a people so blind, so credulous, so helpless in the grasp of a single, shrewd individual.