What a warmth and what a brightness came up in her face. “I knew that you had not,” she said. “Ah, Mister Dorset, I’m glad I’ve met you, if only to know what a difference there can be between two men who have lived the same lives.”
“If I have hurt him,” I told her, “I shall never forgive myself. But I wanted to tell you the truth, rather than let you hear some story….
“Hurt him?” she said coldly. “I tell you, he was dead in my mind the moment I heard the Indian say the name of the father of that poor little boy. And what will become of the child?”
“Of him? Oh, I’ll take care of him, of course. For the sake of Zintcallasappa, poor girl.”
She said hotly: “If all the rest of his life were given to good work, when he came to the gate of heaven, the face of that Indian girl would stop him and send him back.”
She was so close, now, that she could reach out her hand and rest it on my arm.
“But I thank you for everything you’ve told me. Mostly for what you’ve told me about yourself. For we shall be friends. Will you promise me that?”
What could I do but take her hand and wonder at the tears of very kindness in her eyes and call myself the happiest man who saw the setting of the sun that night?
CHUCK AND LEW - ENEMIES
When she went back, I could not go with her. I wanted to be alone and turn over in my mind again all the strange wonders that had come to me in my talk with Mary Kearney. I felt as though I had drawn a star down out of heaven, and now it was so close that I could almost hope, some day, to hold it in my hand. I let White Smoke wander over the snow until it was red with the sunset. Then I turned back to the town. It was still twilight when I came to the edge of it. There was a great, bald-faced, golden moon, hanging in the east, but the day was still bright enough to shut the moonlight away. Out of the shadows of some trees near the road a horseman came out and hailed me.
“Lew Dorset?”
“I’m Dorset.”
He came up to me and held out an envelope.
“Miss Kearney sent me out with this,” he said. “She told me that I’d find you on this side of town. I’ve hunted, but you seemed to have disappeared.”
I ripped the contents out hungrily, and this is what I read:
Mr. Dorset:
This is to warn you that you are in great danger, and danger from the man you call your friend, William Morris. I met him on my way to the forty and, when he talked to me, I told him what 1 knew. He guessed at once that I had been talking with you, and, when I confessed that I had, he went into a terrible passion and swore that I should never see your face again.
Mr. Dorset, he means murder, if ever a man meant it. When I told him that, if I had ever meant to marry him, the story you told me would have changed my mind, he went literally mad.
If I have broken a friendship which you prize, may God and you forgive me, but on my honor he is not worthy to call himself your friend!
Come to my father’s house. There are armed men here. They will protect you, and my father is eager to have you. I am eager, too. If any harm comes to you from this, I shall never have a happy moment from this to the hour of my death.
In most dreadful anxiety, your friend,
Mary Kearney
It is before me now, this letter time has yellowed and worn the creases until the light shines through them. The ink is pale and brown, but it brings back to me now freshly the wretched sorrow that came over me when I first held it, unfolded, in my hand. For I knew, then, that he would find me, and, when he found me, one of us must die.
Oh, time that has put this wrinkled mask over my face, you have no power to change or mask the soul of a man. Mine turns cold and hot, as it turned cold and hot while I rode on into Fort Kempton, watching the shadows on either side of the way, waiting for the glint of the increasing moonshine on the steel barrel of a gun.
He was not lurking there. I reached my teepee on the farther edge of the town and dismounted from White Smoke. As my foot touched the ground, it slipped on a round pebble and made me stoop suddenly forward. That stooping saved my life, for the gun that barked behind me sent a bullet whistling a scant inch above my head.
It was not Chuck Morris who tired that shot, for the man with whom I roved the prairies, in whose hands my life had lain a thousand times, could never have met any enemy and taken him from behind. It was not Chuck Morris. It was the devil into which he had turned on that day and which has not left him even to this present moment, as I sit here writing. How I dread and hate him for all the evil he has done me and all the evil he has hoped to do.
I had wit enough to keep on, lunging down as I heard the gun. I fell flat upon the ground, but with Hudson’s old Colt in my hand, as I fell. Then I whirled over and fired at the shadow that was rushing upon me. I fired and heard him snarl like a wounded tiger. At the same moment a bullet went through my thigh from his flashing revolver. He could have finished me with another shot, but in his madness it was not a killing with his gun that he wanted. He wanted to use his hands. He wanted to feel me die beneath them.
“Traitor and devil!” Morris cried and drove upon me with all his weight.
I could not have risen to meet him, but, as he fell upon me, reaching for my throat, I met him with my hands. The instant they were on him, I knew that I was his master. Yonder lies the iron bar that I bent in my youth. My feeble hands now lift it and wonder over it, for God had given me a strange and marvelous power in those dead days.
I caught him by the wrist, and with the turning of my hand the muscles were bruised against the bone, and the gun dropped to the ground. With that he seemed to know that he was overpowered, for he flung back from me with a shout of fear. His free hand caught up the fallen gun - not by the butt, or that would have been my last second of life, but by the barrel, and he struck the heavy handle against my head. It glanced, cutting the scalp like a knife and loosing a hot flood of blood that poured constantly down during the rest of our battle.
Out of the distance I could hear the squaw in my teepee, screaming for help. But that meant nothing. What can barehanded men do for one assailed by a tiger?
Before he could strike again, I flung myself close to him and got him in the grip of both arms. I scooped up my own gun and beat it into his face and with three strokes turned all that beauty of his into the hideous mask that men knew afterward and that I, alas, was to see many times more. And he, responding to those crushing blows, screamed with rage like a great panther that feels an arrow in his flank.
I had weakened fast under the double drain of blood. He managed to tear his hands loose and get them at my throat. Both of them I could not budge, but one I did, and, while my head swam and darkness poured through my brain, I took his bulky left arm in one hand and across a crooked elbow and broke it like a rotten stick. Like a bulldog his other hand kept its pressure. I fumbled for it in utter blackness. But my hands were too weak to budge it. I reached for his own throat, found it, and fixed my grip on it as I sank into unconsciousness.
Afterward, as they told me, they had to tear us apart. Each was more than half dead. Each, lying in a half trance, was surely killing the other. What Morris awakened to, I cannot tell. What I wakened to was the soft arms of Mary Kearney about me. The pressure of a bandage was around my head and the loud voice of John Kearney was exclaiming: “If he does not live. Doctor, this country west of the Mississippi is too small for you.”
Not live, when I had this to live for? By the crooking of one finger she could have called me back from within the very gates of hell. Not live when she was weeping over me, praying over me?