After a minute, while I watched my royal man, the captain laid his hand on mine. "Don't let these loafers see you crying," he whispered.
"I'm not crying." I looked round to prove that I was not crying, and as I did so, my glance fell upon the old man's miniature medals. One of them was the Victoria Cross.
CHAPTER XI
BILLY O'FLYNN
Kate's Narrative
Both Jesse and I have a habit of committing our thoughts to paper and not to speech. Things written can be destroyed, whereas things said stay terribly alive. I think if other husbands and wives I know of wrote more and talked less, their homes would not feel so dreadful, so full of horrible shadows. There are houses where I feel ill as soon as I cross the door-step, because the very air of the rooms is foul with the spite, the nagging, the strife of bitter souls. As to the houses where horrors have taken place—despair, madness, murder, suicide—these are always haunted, and sensitive people are terrified by ghosts.
My pen has rambled. I sat down to write a thing which must not be said.
Jesse is cruel to young O'Flynn. Perhaps he is justly, rightly cruel, in gibing at this young cow-boy, taunting him until the lad is on the very edge of murder. "Got to be done," says Jesse, "I promised his father that I'd break the colt until he's fed up with robbers. So just you watch me lift the dust from his hide, and don't you git gesticulating on my trail with your fool sympathies." Billy does not suspect that the tormentor loves his victim.
My heart aches with his humiliation. His mother is my cook, not a princess, as the boy's pride would have her. His father was one of the most dangerous leaders of the Rocky Mountain outlaws, so there the lad saw glory, and I don't blame him. But all the glamour was stripped away when Jesse tricked O'Flynn and his gang into surrender, handed them over to justice, and showed poor Billy his sordid heroes for what they really were. His father has been hanged.