“No,” she replied seriously. His words, his manners, his grasp, worried her more and more. Still, she reminded herself, she must be patient, accept life as it had been ordained. There was a slight flutter at her heart, a constriction of her throat; and she wondered if this were love. She should, she felt, exhibit more warmth at Jason's return, the preservation, through such turbulent years of absence, of her image. But it was beyond her power to force her hand to return his pressure: her fingers lay still and cool in his grasp.
“You are just the same, Olive,” he told her; “and I'm glad you're what you are, and that Cottarsport is what it is. That's why I came back: it was in my blood, the old town and you. All the time I kept thinking of when I'd come back rich as I made up my mind to be, and get you what you ought to have—be of some importance in Cottarsport, like the Canderays. The old captain, too, died while I was away. How's Honora?”
“Honora Canderay is an ungodly woman,” Olive asserted with emphasis.
“I don't know anything about that,” he said; “but I always kind of liked to look at her. She reminded me of a schooner with everything set coming up brisk into the wind.” Olive made a motion toward the stove, but he restrained her; rising, he put in fresh wood. Then he turned and again seemed lost in a long, contented inspection of the quiet interior. Olive saw that marks of weariness shadowed his eyes.
“This is what I came back for,” he reiterated; “peaceful as the forests, and yet warm and human. Blood counts.” He returned to his place by her, and leaned forward, very earnestly. “California isn't real the way this is,” he told her; “the women were just paint and powder, like things you would see in a fever, and then you'd wake up, in Cottarsport, well again, with you, Olive.”
She managed to smile at him in acknowledgment of this.
“I'm desperately glad I pulled through without many scars. But there are some, Olive; that was bound to be. I don't know if a man had better say anything about the past, or just let it be, and go on. Times I think one and then the other. Yet you are so calm sitting here, and so good, it would be a big help to tell you... Olive, out on the American, and God knows how sorry I've been, I killed a man, Olive.”
Slowly she felt herself turning icy cold, except for the hot blood rushing into her head. She stared at him for a moment, horrified; and then mechanically drew back, scraping the chair across the floor. Perhaps she hadn't understood, but certainly he had said——
“Wait till I tell what I can for myself,” he hurried on, following her. “It was when the four of us were working with a rocker. I was shoveling the gravel, and every one in California knows that when you're doing that, and find a nugget over half an ounce, it belongs to you personal and not to the partnership. Well, I came on a big one, and laid it away—they all saw it—and then this Eddie Lukens hid it out on me. He was the only one near where I had it; he broke it up and put it in the cradle, sure; and in the talk that followed I—I shot him.”
He laid a detaining hand on her shoulder, but she wrenched herself away.