If he had only kept the faith with her! If he had stood by her in the hour of her great need! The bitterness of his failure ate into the soul of the range-rider as it had done already a thousand times. It did not matter what he did. He could never atone for the desertion on their wedding day. The horrible fact was written in blood. It could not be erased. Forever it would have to stand between them. An unbridgeable gulf separated them, created by his shameless weakness.
When Bob came to earth he found himself clumping down the river road miles from town. He turned and walked back to Bear Cat. His cowpony was at the corral and he was due at the ranch by night.
Young Dillon’s thoughts had been so full of June and his relation to her that it was with a shock of surprise he saw Jake Houck swing out from the hotel porch and bar the way.
“Here’s where you ’n’ me have a settlement,” the Brown’s Park man announced.
“I’m not lookin’ for trouble,” Bob said, and again he was aware of a heavy sinking at the stomach.
“You never are,” jeered Houck. “But it’s right here waitin’ for you, Mr. Rabbit Heart.”
Bob heard the voices of children coming down the road on their way from school. He knew that two or three loungers were watching him and Houck from the doors of adjacent buildings. He was aware of a shouting and commotion farther up the street. But these details reached him only through some subconscious sense of absorption. His whole attention was concentrated on the man in front of him who was lashing himself into a fighting rage.
What did Houck mean to do? Would he throw down on him and kill? Or would he attack with his bare hands? Fury and hatred boiled into the big man’s face. His day had come. He would have his revenge no matter what it cost. Bob could guess what hours of seething rage had filled Houck’s world. The freckle-faced camp flunkey had interfered with his plans, snatched from him the bride he had chosen, brought upon him a humiliation that must be gall to his proud spirit whenever he thought of Bear Cat’s primitive justice. He would pay his debt in full.
The disturbance up the street localized itself. A woman picked up her skirts and flew wildly into a store. A man went over the park fence almost as though he had been shot out of a catapult. Came the crack of a revolver. Some one shouted explanation. “Mad dog!”
A brindle bull terrier swung round the corner and plunged forward. With bristling hair and foaming mouth, it was a creature of horrible menace.