“She wasn’t my mother, Pideau?” he said, and somehow his teeth seemed to clip over each word he spoke. “Then I don’t owe you no blood duty. Ther’ ain’t blood of yours in my body, an’ I’m glad. I won’t say the thing I might, with Annette right here. She’s your kid. You’re her father. But I’ll say this—she’s right; dead right. We’re goin’ to bury Luana, who was a good woman who served you a sight better than you’d a right to. An’ your hands ain’t goin’ to touch her. They ain’t fit. An’ my gun here says that’s so. Them beasts you stole down there are yours to see to. You can go to it. There’s bad blood in you for me when you only need to hand me thanks. An’ while that’s so you ken play your own dirty game. I ain’t scared a thing, Pideau. You want to kill me. You’ve wanted that way ever since last night. Just get it good, if there’s to be a killin’ ther’s two of us in the game.”
Pideau moved as though to rush in on the lank figure whose reckless fury had flung so desperate a challenge. But as he did so the boy’s gun leaped to his shoulder, and his eye fell to the sights.
Pideau made no further movement. Only his narrowed eyes looked yearningly on his own rifle propped against the dugout wall close beside the Wolf.
Then it was that Annette took a great decision. Her untamed spirit flared up. She remembered the Wolf’s boast down on the river bank. Here she was witness to its truth and reality. In that moment the Wolf had grown to the proportions of the hero of her woman’s worship.
“Lay a hand on him, father, an’ I will help him beat you,” she cried, with all the violence she was accustomed to fling at the boy. “You’re just my father. But he’s my—Wolf.”
The Wolf’s gun had held the man. But the girl had achieved something more. Her violence had no part in it. It was something deeper, something of which she was all unaware.
Whatever Pideau’s crimes, whatever his evil, Annette was the child of his body and blood. She was the child whose appeal had saved him from his greatest crime years before. And now the nature between them went for nothing. She had flung herself into the arms of the boy against him.
Pideau was alone; outcast; and he felt that the world of mankind was now completely arrayed against him.
The overwhelmingness of it was too much for his hardihood. He could not face it. His bluff failed him. Without a word he turned away. He moved off. And passing down the hillside on his way to the cattle a sound came back to the two who stood watching him. It was the sound of a bitter, jarring laugh.