The woman was breathing hard again.  “I heerd about that, too—­jest the other day.  I don’t believe hit!”

“It is true, just the same.  But I didn’t come out here to talk about Miss Dabney.  I want to know a name—­the name of a man.”

She shook her head again and relapsed into unresponsiveness.

“I cayn’t tell; he’d shore kill me.  He’s always allowed he’d do hit if I let on.”

“Tell me his name, and I’ll kill him before he ever gets a chance at you,” was the savage rejoinder.

“D’ye reckon you’d do that, Tom-Jeff—­for me?”

The light of the old allurement was glowing in the dark eyes when she said it, but there was no answering thrill of passion in his blood.  For one moment, indeed, the bestial demon whispered that here was vengeance of a sort, freely proffered; but the fiercer devil thrust this one aside, and Tom found himself looking consciously and deliberately into the abyss of crime.  Once he might have said such a thing in the mere exuberance of anger, meaning nothing more deadly than the retaliatory buffet of passion.  But now—­

It was as if the curtain of the civilizing, the humanizing, ages had been withdrawn a hand’s-breadth to give him a clear outlook on primordial chaos.  Once across the mystic threshold, untrammeled by the hamperings of tradition, unterrified by the threat of the mythical future, the human atom becomes its own law, the arbiter of its own momentary destiny.  What it wills to do, it may do—­if iron-shod chance, blind and stumbling blindly, does not happen to trample on and efface it.  Who first took it on him to say, Thou shalt not kill?  What were any or all of the prohibitions but the frantic shrillings of some of the atoms to the others?

In the clear outlook Thomas Gordon saw himself as one whose foot was already across the threshold.  True, he had thus far broken with the world of time-honored traditions only in part.  But why should he scruple to be wholly free?  If the man whose deed of brutality or passion was disturbing the chanceful equilibrium for two other human dust-grains should be identified, why should he not be effaced?

The child at Nan’s breast stirred in its sleep and threw up its tiny hands in the convulsive movement which is the human embryo’s first unconscious protest against the helplessness of which it is born inheritor.  Tom stood up, beating the air softly with the hunting-crop.

“The man has spoiled your life, Nan; and, incidentally, he has muddied the spring for me—­robbed me of the love and respect of the one woman in the world,” he said, quite without heat.  “If I find him, I think I shall blot him out—­like that.”  A bumblebee was bobbing and swaying on a head of red clover, and the sudden swish of the hunting-crop left it a little disorganized mass of black and yellow down and broken wing-filaments.

The glow in the dark eyes of the woman had died down again, and her voice was hard and lifeless when she said: