This had grown to be an ordeal for Jorth. He seemed a victim of contending tides of feeling. Some will or struggle broke within him and the change was manifest. Haggard, shifty-eyed, with wabbling chin, he burst into speech.
“See heah, girl. You listen. There’s a clique of ranchers down in the Basin, all those you named, with Isbel at their haid. They have resented sheepmen comin’ down into the valley. They want it all to themselves. That’s the reason. Shore there’s another. All the Isbels are crooked. They’re cattle an’ horse thieves—have been for years. Gaston Isbel always was a maverick rustler. He’s gettin’ old now an’ rich, so he wants to cover his tracks. He aims to blame this cattle rustlin’ an’ horse stealin’ on to us sheepmen, an’ run us out of the country.”
Gravely Ellen Jorth studied her father’s face, and the newly found truth-seeing power of her eyes did not fail her. In part, perhaps in all, he was telling lies. She shuddered a little, loyally battling against the insidious convictions being brought to fruition. Perhaps in his brooding over his failures and troubles he leaned toward false judgments. Ellen could not attach dishonor to her father’s motives or speeches. For long, however, something about him had troubled her, perplexed her. Fearfully she believed she was coming to some revelation, and, despite her keen determination to know, she found herself shrinking.
“Dad, mother told me before she died that the Isbels had ruined you,” said Ellen, very low. It hurt her so to see her father cover his face that she could hardly go on. “If they ruined you they ruined all of us. I know what we had once—what we lost again and again—and I see what we are come to now. Mother hated the Isbels. She taught me to hate the very name. But I never knew how they ruined you—or why—or when. And I want to know now.”
Then it was not the face of a liar that Jorth disclosed. The present was forgotten. He lived in the past. He even seemed younger ‘in the revivifying flash of hate that made his face radiant. The lines burned out. Hate gave him back the spirit of his youth.
“Gaston Isbel an’ I were boys together in Weston, Texas,” began Jorth, in swift, passionate voice. “We went to school together. We loved the same girl—your mother. When the war broke out she was engaged to Isbel. His family was rich. They influenced her people. But she loved me. When Isbel went to war she married me. He came back an’ faced us. God! I’ll never forget that. Your mother confessed her unfaithfulness—by Heaven! She taunted him with it. Isbel accused me of winnin’ her by lies. But she took the sting out of that.
“Isbel never forgave her an’ he hounded me to ruin. He made me out a card-sharp, cheatin’ my best friends. I was disgraced. Later he tangled me in the courts—he beat me out of property—an’ last by convictin’ me of rustlin’ cattle he run me out of Texas.”
Black and distorted now, Jorth’s face was a spectacle to make Ellen sick with a terrible passion of despair and hate. The truth of her father’s ruin and her own were enough. What mattered all else? Jorth beat the table with fluttering, nerveless hands that seemed all the more significant for their lack of physical force.
“An’ so help me God, it’s got to be wiped out in blood!” he hissed.
That was his answer to the wavering and nobility of Ellen. And she in her turn had no answer to make. She crept away into the corner behind the curtain, and there on her couch in the semidarkness she lay with strained heart, and a resurging, unconquerable tumult in her mind. And she lay there from the middle of that afternoon until the next morning.