“Why not?” Stroude asked sharply, his shoulders lifting as if for defence.
“Then I reckon you’re none too glad to see me?”
“You haven’t come here to ask me that. You might as well tell me first as last what you want from me.”
“Nothing you’ll call the sheriff about,” the man told him. He faced the Senator squarely, revealing even in the half-darkness a certain racial resemblance to him which made them equals on the instant. For all Stroude’s grooming and the stranger’s shabbiness, they were strangely akin in their antagonism, bound not by family ties but by broader, more basic associations. Each of them, tall, thin, lithe, gazed on the other with unflinching blue eyes. Each of them kept watch with wildcat tenacity. From each of them emanated the recklessness of personal courage that takes no count of law beyond its own code. In their sudden springing to guard, the predominant characteristics of the two men, the Senator and the shambling shadower, flared up stronger than their setting, and although the lights of the White House gleamed golden across the Square, they were mountaineers facing each other in the hate of vendetta. The years and the place fell away from Stroude, leaving him stripped to the bone of his clan’s creed.
“We’ve settled our own affairs before,” Stroude said. “We can do it now.”
As if the words gave him advantage, the other man seized them swiftly. “Let’s do it, then,” he replied. “I’ve come here to get you to do something you won’t want to do. Will you fight me for it?”
“Not till I know the stake.”
“Didn’t you get her letter?”
“Whose?”
“There’s only one woman I’d be coming to you about, I reckon.”