blood. He had been through the icy chill of dull despair and then
plunged into the blast furnace of red wrath. Upon some guilty agency
reprisal must be wreaked--and as if with a revelation, he thought he
saw the origin of the conspiracy which his father had long ago
suspected.

He saw it so late because until now his mind had been too focused on
effects to hark back to causes, and now that he did see it, unless he
could be curbed, he would run amuck with the recklessness of a Mad
Mullah.

"Let me go, damn ye," the young man almost shrieked as he tore himself
loose from the restraining grasp, and flung the old preacher spinning
to the side so that he fell to his knees, shaken. He clambered up
slowly with a thin trickle of blood on his lips, where his teeth had
cut them in the fall.

"Thet war a pity, Bear Cat," he said in a queer voice, though still
unangered, wiping his mouth with his bony hand. "I'd thought thet we
two--with a common sorrow between us----" There he broke off, and the
boy stood for a breathing space, panting and smoldering. He could not
come back to cold sanity at one step because he had been too far shaken
from his balance--but as he watched the gray-haired man, to whom he had
always looked up with veneration and love, standing there, hurt to the
quick, and realized that upon that man he had laid violent hands, the
crazy fire in his arteries began to cool into an unutterable
mortification.

Since the cattle trader's story had been told back in the Virginia
cabin, until this moment, his mind had been successively scorched with
wrath, chilled in despair and buffeted by hurricane violence, but never
had it for a tranquil instant been stilled to normality. Over at the
Quarterhouse, when in Berserker rage he had been lashing out through a
red mist of battle, he had suffered less than since, because in action
he was spending the hoarded accumulation of wrath--but since then he
had been in the pits of an unbearable hell.

Now at the sight of that unresenting figure, wiping the blood from its
lip, a new emotion swept him with a flood of chagrin and self-contempt.
He had struck down a friend, defenseless and old, who had sought only
to give true counsel. The stubborn spirit that had upheld him as he
fought his fever-scalded way over the hills, and remained with him as
he watched the wedding ceremony, broke; and with face hidden behind
spread palms and a body racked by a spasm of collapse, he shook with
d