"Yes--yes! I've seen--that. It's awful!... I never harmed you.... Don't kill me! Let me live, Wade. I swear to God I'll--I'll never do it again.... For dad's sake--for Collie's sake--don't kill me!"
"I'm Hell-Bent Wade!... You wouldn't listen to them--when they wanted to tell you who I am!"
Every word of Wade's drove home to this boy the primal meaning of sudden death. It inspired him with an unutterable fear. That was what clamped his brow in a sweaty band and upreared his hair and rolled his eyeballs. His magnified intelligence, almost ghastly, grasped a hope in Wade's apparent vacillation and in the utterance of the name of Columbine. Intuition, a subtle sense, inspired him to beg in that name.
"Swear you'll give up Collie!" demanded Wade, brandishing his guns with bloody hands.
"Yes--yes! My God, I'll do anything!" moaned Belllounds.
"Swear you'll tell your father you'd had a change of heart. You'll give Collie up!... Let Moore have her!"
"I swear!... But if you tell dad--I stole his cattle--he'll do for me!"
"We won't squeal that. I'll save you if you give up the girl. Once more, Buster Jack--try an' make me believe you'll square the deal."
Belllounds had lost his voice. But his mute, fluttering lips were infinite proof of the vow he could not speak. The boyishness, the stunted moral force, replaced the manhood in him then. He was only a factor in the lives of others, protected even from this Nemesis by the greatness of his father's love.
"Get up, an' take my scarf," said Wade, "an' bandage these bullet-holes I got."