“You won’t get no money shootin’ me.”

“Yes, I will—­just as much—­dead as alive.”

With his hands raised a little way above the level of his shoulders, he stood rigidly at bay in the circle of light.

“Well,” he croaked at last, “go ahead and shoot.  I ain’t aimin’ to be took—­not by no woman.  Shoot, damn you, and have it done with.  I’m waitin’!”

“Keep up those hands!”

“I won’t!” He lowered them defiantly.  “I w-wanted to m-make Partridgeville and see the old lady.  She’d ‘a’ helped me.  But anything’s better’n goin’ back to that hell where I been the last two years.  Go on!  Why don’t you shoot?”

“You wanted to make Partridgeville and see—­who?”

“My mother—­and my wife.”

“Have you got a mother?  Have you got a—­wife?”

“Yes, and three kids.  Why don’t you shoot?”

It seemed an eon that they stood so.  The McBride woman was trying to find the nerve to fire.  She could not.  In that instant she made a discovery that many luckless souls make too late:  to kill a man is easy to talk about, easy to write about.  But to stand deliberately face to face with a fellow-human—­alive, pulsing, breathing, fearing, hoping, loving, living,—­point a weapon at him that would take his life, blot him from the earth, negate twenty or thirty years of childhood, youth, maturity, and make of him in an instant—­nothing! —­that is quite another matter.

He was helpless before her now.  Perhaps the expression on his face had something to do with the sudden revulsion that halted her finger.  Facing certain death, some of the evil in those crooked eyes seemed to die out, and the terrible personality of the man to fade.  Regardless of her danger, regardless of what he would have done to her if luck had not turned the tables, Cora McBride saw before her only a lone man with all society’s hand against him, realizing he had played a bad game to the limit and lost, two big tears creeping down his unshaved face, waiting for the end.

“Three children!” she whispered faintly.

“Yes.”

“You’re going back to see them?”

“Yes, and my mother.  Mother’d help me get to Canada—­somehow.”

Cora McBride had forgotten all about the five thousand dollars.  She was stunned by the announcement that this man had relatives—­a mother, a wife, three babies.  The human factor had not before occurred to her.  Murderers!  They have no license to let their eyes well with tears, to have wives and babies, to possess mothers who will help them get to Canada regardless of what their earthly indiscretions may have been.

At this revelation the gun-point wavered.  The sight of those tears on his face sapped her will-power even as a wound in her breast might have drained her life-blood.

Her great moment had been given her.  She was letting it slip away.  She had her reward in her hand for the mere pulling of a trigger and no incrimination for the result.  For a bit of human sentiment she was bungling the situation unpardonably, fatally.