“He’d wrote I was to hand her, Vada, over to him ten miles out on this trail––or there’d be trouble.”
Wild Bill stirred and shifted his seat with a fierce dash of irritation. His face was stern and his black eyes blazing. He spat out his chew of tobacco.
“An’ you was scared to death, like some silly skippin’ sheep. You hadn’t bowel enough to tell him to go to hell. You felt like handin’ him any other old thing you’d got––‘Here, go on, help yourself.’” He flung out his arms to illustrate his meaning. “‘You got my wife; here’s my kiddies. If you need anything else, you can sure get my claim. Guess my shack’ll make you an elegant summer palace.’ Gee!”
The gambler’s scorn was withering, and with each burst of it he flourished his arms as though handing out possessions to an imaginary James. And every word he spoke smote Scipio, goading him and lashing up the hatred which burnt deep down in his heart for the man who had ruined his life.
But the little man’s thought of Jessie was not so easily set aside, and he jumped to defend himself.
“You don’t understand––” he began. But the other cut him short with a storm of scathing anger.
“No, I sure don’t understand,” he cried, “I don’t. I sure don’t. Guess I’m on’y jest a man. I ain’t no sort o’ bum angel, nor sanctimonious sky-bustin’ hymn-smiter. I’m on’y a man. An’ I kind o’ thank them as is responsible that I ain’t nuthin’ else. Say”––his piercing eyes seemed to bore their way right down to the little man’s heart like red-hot needles––“I ain’t got a word to say to you but you orter be herdin’ wi’ a crowd o’ mangy gophers. Tchah! A crowd o’ maggots ’ud cut you off’n their visitin’ list in a diseased carkis. Here’s a feller robs you in the meanest way a man ken be robbed, an’ you’re yearnin’ to hand him more––a low-down cur of a stage-robber, a cattle-thief, the lowest down bum ever created––an’ you’d hand over this pore innercent little kiddie to him. Was there ever sech a white-livered sucker? Say, you’re responsible fer that pore little gal’s life, you’re responsible fer her innercent soul, an’ you’d hand her over to James, like the worstest cur in creation. Say, I ain’t got words to tell you what you are. You’re a white-livered bum that even hell won’t give room to. You’re––”
“Here, hold on,” cried Scipio, turning, with his pale eyes mildly blazing. “You’re wrong, all wrong. I ain’t doing it because I’m scared of James. I don’t care nothing for his threats. I’m scared of no man––not even you. See? My Jessie’s callin’ for her gal––my Jessie! Do you know what that means to me? No, of course you don’t. You don’t know my Jessie. You ain’t never loved a wife like my Jessie. You ain’t never felt what a kiddie is to its mother. You can’t see as I can see. This little gal,” he went on, tenderly laying an arm about Vada’s small shoulders, “will, maybe, save my pore Jessie. That pore gal has hit the wrong trail, an’––an’ I’d sacrifice everything in the world to save her. I’d––I’d sell my own soul. I’d give it to––save her.”
Scipio looked fearlessly into the gambler’s eyes. His pale cheeks were lit by a hectic flush of intense feeling. There was a light in his eyes of such honesty and devotion that the other lowered his. He could not look upon it unmoved.
Bill sat back, for once in his life disconcerted. All his righteous indignation was gone out of him. He was confronted with a spectacle such as, in his checkered career, he had never before been brought into contact with. It was the meeting of two strangely dissimilar, yet perfectly human, forces. Each was fighting for what he knew to be right. Each was speaking from the bottom of a heart inspired by his sense of human right and loyalty. While the gambler, without subtlety of emotion, saw only with a sense of human justice, with a hatred of the man who had so wronged this one, with a desire to thwart him at every turn, the other possessed a breadth of feeling sufficient to put out of his thoughts all recollection of his personal wrong, if only he could help the woman he loved.