“We hate to inconvenience you, ma’am, but it seems like at this distance from town we’ve got to ask you for supper and a place to sleep.”
If it had not been for the thought of Hugh in hiding, that supper and the evening about the hearth would have been to Sylvie a pleasant one. The men, apparently laying aside all suspicion, were entertaining; their adventurous lives had bristled with exciting, moving, humorous experience. It was Sylvie herself, prompted by curiosity, believing as she did that the monster the sheriff had described bore no possible resemblance to the man she loved, who asked suddenly:
“Do tell us about the man you’re hunting for now—this Rutherford? Tell us about what he did.”
The Easterner gave her a look, and Bella, seeing it, chimed in: “Yes, sure. Tell us about his crime.”
Pete stood up and rolled another cigarette. Try as he might to steady his fingers, they trembled. He had never heard Hugh’s story. He did not want to hear it. The very name of Rutherford that had, in what now seemed to him another age, belonged to Hugh and to him was terrible in his ears. A sickness of dread seized him. Fortunately the eyes of neither of the men were upon him. Sylvie had their whole attention.
The detective spoke. “He was a storekeeper back in a university town, way East, where I came from. He kept a bookshop and had a heap of book-learning. I remember him myself, though I was a youngster. He was a wonderful, astonishing sort of chap, though as ugly as the devil; had a great gift of narration, never told the truth in his life, I guess, but that only made him all the more entertaining. And he had a temper—phew! Redhot! He’d fly out and storm and strike in all directions. That’s what did for him. Some fool quarrel about a book it was, and the man, a frequenter of the shop, a scholar, a scientist, professor at the university, accused Rutherford of lying. Rutherford had a heavy brass paper-cutter in his hand. The professor had a nasty tongue in his head. Well, a tongue’s no match for a paper-cutter. The professor said too much, called Rutherford a hump-backed liar and got a clip on the head that did for him.”
“It’s an ugly story,” said Sylvie. Bella and Pete retained their silence.
“Murder ain’t pretty telling, as a general thing,” remarked the sheriff.
“No, though I’ve heard of cases where a man was justified in killing another man—I mean to save some one he loved from dreadful suffering,” Sylvie replied.
“Well, ma’am, I don’t know about that. I’ve read stories that make it look that way, but in all my experience, it’s the cowards and the fools that kill, and they do it because they’re lower down, closer to the beast, or perhaps to an uncontrolled child, than most of us.”