He held the playing card out before him and looked at it steadily, clutching it in one trembling hand, and as he did so tears came into his red eyes and trickled down his swollen cheeks. To a certain extent they were maudlin tears, yet they testified to a real and deep emotion.
“The queen of hearts,” he said; “the only picture I’ve got of her—ever had of her; it don’t look like her, yet it makes me think of her. And I don’t want to think of her no more; it’s bad business, and it don’t do me no good. It’s what set me to drinkin’ and howlin’ round like a locoed Injun. I reckon I played the fool ginerally and made a swath-wide nuisance of myself. But no more for me—this is the end of it.”
Rising, he stepped up to the mesquite tree and pinned the card to it; then he went back and sat down again on the stone.
After staring at the card a while he drew out his revolver and began to shoot at it. His hand was unsteady and his first shot went wide, but the next cut through the middle of the card.
“She’s dead, and the past is dead, and now I’ll kill even the memory,” he muttered. “I’ve hung to that card a long time, and it was all I had that suggested her; now even that goes. I don’t want to think about it any more. I didn’t treat her right, and she didn’t treat me right; and—but what’s the use o’ thinkin’? It’s all gone, and dead; and she is dead; and here goes the only thing that’s left to remind me of her.”
Again his revolver cracked spitefully in the clear air of the morning.
The bullet nicked a hole in the forehead of the picture.
He stared at it, his face paling a little.
“Just where I got the lance head of old Fire Top that time,” he said. “That was a stem-winder—wonderful that it didn’t finish me! If it was that old heathen who was dead, instead of her! But he’s still livin’ to do more meanness in the world. Yes, I wisht it had been him; or that this card was his ugly, painted mug that I’m shootin’ at. He wouldn’t be waitin’, though, for me to set here and plug him like this; he’d be doin’ something himself, like he did before.”
His revolver swung between his knees, in his right hand. With his left he touched significantly the scarlet scar on his forehead.