When Langford answered her, which was not immediately, his face was white and he spoke quietly with a touch of injured pride.
“If you want to hurt us, Miss Williston, that is the way to talk. We cowmen do not do things for thanks.”
She looked at him wonderingly a moment, then said, simply, “Forgive me,” but her lips were trembling and she turned to the wall to hide the tears that would come. After all, she was only a woman—with nerves—and the reaction had come. She had been brave, but a girl cannot bear everything. She sobbed. That was too much for Langford and his dignity. He bent over her, all his heart in his honest eyes and broken voice.
“Now you will kill me if you don’t stop it. I am all sorts of a brute—oh, deuce take me for a blundering idiot! I didn’t mean it—honest I didn’t. You will believe me, won’t you? There is nothing in the world I wouldn’t do for you, little girl.”
She was sobbing uncontrollably now.
“Mr. Langford,” she cried, turning to him with something of the past horror creeping again into her wet eyes, “do you think I killed—that man?”
“What man? There was only one man killed, and one of my boys potted him on the run,” he said.
“Are you sure?” she breathed, in quick relief.
“Dead sure,” convincingly.
“And yet,” she sobbed, memory coming back with a rush, “I wish—I wish—I had killed them all.”