“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 had grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them.  I know not why, but I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths—­mental depths—­which held a message that I feared.  So I procrastinated, staying on in the air which had given me red blood.  But that was cowardly, and that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of irresponsibility.  I was going home!

“When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse.  I had just as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if he would.  Yes, I was strong.  I had conquered.  And if Leddy hit me, why, I did not have to go back to battle with the shadows—­the obsession of shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew.  When I was smiling in Leddy’s muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying, like some boaster, ‘Could you do this, millions?’ I—­I—­well, Mary, I—­I have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before.”

“Thank you, Jack!” she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached, permeating, and transcendent.

“When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight,” he went on.  “I wanted to see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in battle.  After Leddy’s shot in the arroyo I found that strength had discovered something else in me—­something that had lain dormant in boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five years on the desert—­something of which all my boyhood training made me no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very strength I had won.  It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and peace itself—­a lawless, devil-like creature!  Yes, I gloried in the fact that I could kill Leddy.  It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on him.  And you saw and felt that in me—­yes, I tell you everything as a man must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels, his devils, and his dreams!”