things in Nature, and how she mussed them up.  And how we’d have done a heap better if the job had been ours.  Well?” His smile deepened.  “Here we are standing in the sort of fool position of—­what’ll I call it?  Antagonism?  Anyway we agreed to fight, and stand for all it meant to us, and we’re both feeling all broken up at the way we had to act to hurt each other most.”  He shook his head.  “Where’s our boasted sense of things?  We ought to be sitting right here talking it over, and laughing to beat the band, that I had to treat you like a dangerous bunch of goods li’ble to get me by the throat, and choke the life out of me, while you were chasing every old notion folks could stuff into your dandy head to set me broke and busted so I wouldn’t know where to collect a square feed once a week.  That’s what we ought to be doing, if we had the sense we guess.  Instead of that you’re feeling badly at me for the things I had to do to you.  And I’m worried to death I’ll never get a laugh from you for the fool talk I don’t know better than to make.  You need me to send that message to Peterman.  Why, sure I’ll send it, even if it’s to tell him how mighty glad you are to be quitting the prison I’d condemned you to, and the joy it’s going to hand you to see his darnation Teuton face again.  Sure I’ll send it.  It’s the least I can do to make up to you for those things I’ve done to you.  But—­but for God’s sake don’t ask me to read it.”

The man concluded with a gesture that betrayed his real feelings.  He was in desperate earnest for all his attempt at lightness.  His words came swiftly, in that headlong fashion so characteristic of his most earnest mood.  And Nancy listening to him, caught something of that which lay behind them.  The faintest shadow of a smile struggled into her eyes.  She shook her head.

“I haven’t a thought in my head about you—­that way,” she said.  “It’s not been that way with me.  No.”  She averted her gaze from the eager eyes before her.  “It’s the thing I’ve done and been.  It’s the thing you, and every other honest creature, must feel about me.  Oh, don’t you see?  The killing, the bloodshed and suffering—­But I can’t talk about it even now.  It’s all too dreadful still.  I’m quitting when Father Adam goes, and—­and—­But believe me no judgment you can pass on me can begin to express the thing I feel about myself.  Please don’t think I bear one single hard thought against you.”

The man laughed outright.  The buoyancy of that moment was supreme.  Bat Harker was again in his mind.  Bat, with all his quaint, crude philosophy.

“Say, that beats everything,” Bull cried.  “My judgment of you.  And all this time I’ve been guessing—­Oh, hell!  Say, do you know, it gets me bad when I think of you going back to Peterman and his crew?  It sets me well-nigh crazy.  Oh, I know.  I’ve no right.  None at all.  But it don’t make me feel any better.  Here, I’ll tell you about it.  I’m not going to take to myself