larly!

"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his
knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken
his arm. I had not meant to break his arm--yet I know that I might have
done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy--yet there was
something in me which might have killed him but for you!"

"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.

A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the _arroyo_
and beside the hedge, passed over her face.

"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this
terrible impulse rose in me."

"I know."

"You know? You know?" he repeated.

"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if
you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have
done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of
tightened nerves.

"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did
not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to
see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our
power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"

"Yes?"

For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him.
It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the
pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan
kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to
the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.

"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the
solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan
of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel
of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my
finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight--oh, that is
difficult, shooting by moonlight!--and I gloried in my increasing
accuracy--I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas
of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to
enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down
into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry
out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of
anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their
master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I