ugly pride in showing folks that
what I said went, whether or no.

"My wife--she's a good woman--I do'no what she'd do if she was to know
all that I've done or tried to do, but I reckon you know pretty well,
Miss Leslie. Well, you've known Jake Horton as he was. I'm going to
give you all a chance to know him as he is now. When a man undertakes
to do a bit of spite work like this; work that he's no call to feel
proud of, and knows that so well that he tries to do it alone and in
the dark, and is held back from making a consummate idiot of himself,
and a criminal, too, like enough, by a dog and a young girl, it's time
to call a halt. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to call a halt
and travel a new trail from this on. I don't ask you to believe
anything that I say, Miss Leslie, there ain't no reason at present why
you should, but there will be!" He paused to moisten his dry lips. I
looked up at him expectantly. "I'm going to do what's right by you and
yours, from this on," he said, in answer to the look. Despite my past
acquaintance with him I believed him, and indignantly strove to
smother the tormenting little recollection that would keep obtruding
itself--the recollection that, from the moment that the deed to the
homestead was secured this man would be powerless to injure us, unless
he did it openly and in ways that might be easily brought home to him,
and it was now too late for him to do us any harm at the Land Office.

I am ashamed to be obliged to record that Mr. Horton's declaration of
a change in his feelings toward us, and his promises of better conduct
toward us in the future were accompanied in my secret thought by such
damaging reflections, but such was the case. The dictionary was under
my arm and glancing down at it I said: "I would like to know, if you
don't mind, Mr. Horton, how this book--and you--came to be under the
ruins of that shack?"

There was a big black and blue bruise on the back of Mr. Horton's
right hand, the hand that some weeks previously had been injured by an
oak splinter, as he told his wife, on the night that I had fired at a
man fleeing up the hillside. Looking attentively at the bruise, and
not at all at me, Mr. Horton replied:

"Well; it was an easier thing to undertake than it is to tell; that's
so. 'Bout as easy to tell though as it was to go through with. That's
a wide-awake dog of yours, Miss Leslie, lives up to his name, too. He
was living right up to it last night whe