ould have shown him that there must have been cause
for his father's brutal treatment of him--if indeed it had been brutal.
In fact, if he had acted in his youth as he had acted since reaching
maturity, there was small reason to wonder that he had received blows.
Boys needed to be reprimanded, punished, and perhaps he had deserved
all he had received.

The tone of his father's letters was distinctly sorrowful. Remorse,
sincere remorse, had afflicted him. His father had been wronged,
misled, betrayed, and humiliated by the Taggarts, and as Calumet stood
beside the corral fence he found that all his rage--the bitter,
malignant hatred which had once been in his heart against his
father--had vanished, that it had been succeeded by an emotion that was
new to him--pity. An hour, two hours, passed before he turned and
walked toward the ranchhouse. His lips were grim and white, tell-tale
signs of a new resolve, as he stepped softly upon the rear porch,
stealthily opened the kitchen door, and let himself in. He halted at
the table on which stood the kerosene lamp, looking at the chair in
which he had been sitting some hours before talking to Betty, blinking
at the chair in which she had sat, summoning into his mind the picture
she had made when he had voiced his suspicions about her knowledge of
the contents of the letter she had given him. "Nobody but a fool could
hate Betty," the letter had read. And at the instant he had read the
words he had known that he didn't hate her. But he was a fool, just
the same; he was a fool for treating her as he did--as Dade had said.
He had known that all along; he knew that was the reason why he had
curbed his rage when it would have driven him to commit some rash
action. He had been a fool, but had he let himself go he would have
been a bigger one.

Betty had appraised him correctly--"sized him up," in Dade's idiomatic
phraseology--and knew that his vicious impulses were surface ones that
had been acquired and not inherited, as he had thought. And he was
strangely pleased.

He looked once around the room, noting the spotless cleanliness of it
before he blew out the light. And then he stepped across the floor and
into the dining-room, tip-toeing toward the stairs, that he might
awaken no one. But he halted in amazement when he reached a point near
the center of the room, for he saw, under the threshold of the door
that led from the dining-room to his father's office, a weak,
fl