"You're entitled to your leave, you're entitled to resign your commission if you want to," he said with a quick return to his more official attitude. Then, with a sudden unbending under the pressure of curiosity and even sympathy: "I'm sorry. I'm darn sorry. You're the one man in my command I'd just hate to lose. Still—What do you figure to do?"
"Do?"
The sharp interrogation came with startling force. It came full of a world of suppressed feeling. Irony, bitterness, harsh, inflexible purpose. These things and others, which were beyond McDowell's estimation, rang in that sharp exclamation. Steve laughed, and even to the Superintendent there was something utterly hateful in the sound that broke on his ears.
"Just forget you're my superior officer, McDowell," Steve cried, raising a pair of eyes which blazed with a frigid passion of hate. "Just figure we're two plain men, no better and no worse than most. You've a wife and two kiddies, both growing as you'd have them. A schoolgirl and a boy, and round whom you've built up all your notions of life. I had a wife and one kiddie, and round them I'd built up all my notions of life. Well, those notions of life are wrecked. They'd been building years. Years before I had a wife. To-day they're gone completely. I haven't a wife, and, God help me, I haven't a kiddie. And this because of one man. I've got to find that man."
The two men were gazing eye to eye, McDowell's darkly keen and questioning, Steve's full of irrevocable decision and cold hate.
"And when you—find him?"
Steve made a movement of the hands. It was indescribable but significant. His lips parted to speak, and, in parting, his even teeth were unusually bared.
"He's going to die!"
The words were spoken without emotion, without colour. They were quiet, and carried a conviction that left the other without a shadow of doubt.
"I'm telling you this, McDowell, so you shall know clearly what's on my mind." Steve went on after a pause. "Maybe you'll feel, as an officer of police, it's up to you to do everything to prevent what I intend. But I tell you you can't prevent it. I demand the right of a man from a man, a husband, and a father. I'm quitting. If you try to hold me it'll make no difference. You can delay. It'll make no difference. I shall quit—eventually. And then I shall carry out my purpose. Get that. Then we'll understand each other."