And Nettie?  I loved Nettie still, but now with the intensest jealousy, with the keen, unmeasuring hatred of wounded pride, and baffled, passionate desire.

Section 2

As I came down the hill from Clayton Crest—­for my shilling and a penny only permitted my traveling by train as far as Two-Mile Stone, and thence I had to walk over the hill—­I remember very vividly a little man with a shrill voice who was preaching under a gas-lamp against a hoarding to a thin crowd of Sunday evening loafers.  He was a short man, bald, with a little fair curly beard and hair and watery blue eyes, and he was preaching that the end of the world drew near.

I think that is the first time I heard any one link the comet with the end of the world.  He had got that jumbled up with international politics and prophecies from the Book of Daniel.

I stopped to hear him only for a moment or so.  I do not think I should have halted at all but his crowd blocked my path, and the sight of his queer wild expression, the gesture of his upward-pointing finger, held me.

“There is the end of all your Sins and Follies,” he bawled.  “There!  There is the Star of Judgments, the Judgments of the most High God!  It is appointed unto all men to die—­unto all men to die”—­his voice changed to a curious flat chant—­“and after death, the Judgment!  The Judgment!”

I pushed and threaded my way through the bystanders and went on, and his curious harsh flat voice pursued me.  I went on with the thoughts that had occupied me before—­where I could buy a revolver, and how I might master its use—­and probably I should have forgotten all about him had he not taken a part in the hideous dream that ended the little sleep I had that night.  For the most part I lay awake thinking of Nettie and her lover.

Then came three strange days—­three days that seem now to have been wholly concentrated upon one business.

This dominant business was the purchase of my revolver.  I held myself resolutely to the idea that I must either restore myself by some extraordinary act of vigor and violence in Nettie’s eyes or I must kill her.  I would not let myself fall away from that.  I felt that if I let this matter pass, my last shred of pride and honor would pass with it, that for the rest of my life I should never deserve the slightest respect or any woman’s love.  Pride kept me to my purpose between my gusts of passion.

Yet it was not easy to buy that revolver.

I had a kind of shyness of the moment when I should have to face the shopman, and I was particularly anxious to have a story ready if he should see fit to ask questions why I bought such a thing.  I determined to say I was going to Texas, and I thought it might prove useful there.  Texas in those days had the reputation of a wild lawless land.  As I knew nothing of caliber or impact, I wanted also to be