When the minute hand of the watch in his pocket had made one more circuit, both Bruce and Linda found themselves upon their feet. The tension had broken at last. Her emotion had been curbed too long. It broke from her in a flood.

She seized his hands, and he started at their touch. "Don't you understand?" she cried. "You—you—you are Folger's son. You are the boy that crept out—under this very tree—to find him dead. All my life Elmira and I have prayed for you to come. And what are you going to do?"

Her face was drawn in the white light of the moon. For an instant he seemed dazed.

"Do?" he repeated. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"You don't!" she cried, in infinite scorn. "Are you just clay? Aren't you a man? Haven't you got arms to strike with and eyes to see along a rifle barrel? Are you a coward—and a weakling; one of your mother's blood to run away? Haven't you anything to avenge? I thought you were a mountain man—that all your years in cities couldn't take that quality away from you! Haven't you any answer?"

He looked up, a strange light growing on his face. "You mean—killing?"

"What else? To kill—never to stop killing—one after another until they are gone! Till Simon Turner and the whole Turner clan have paid the debts they owe."

Bruce recoiled as if from a blow. "Turner? Did you say Turner?" he asked hoarsely.

"Yes. That's the clan's name. I thought you knew."

There was an instant of strange truce. Both stood motionless. The scene no longer seemed part of the world that men have come to know in these latter years,—a land of cities and homes and peaceful twilights over quiet countrysides. The moon was still strange and white in the sky; the pines stood tall and dark and sad,—eternal emblems of the wilderness. The fire had burned down to a few lurid coals glowing in the gray ashes. No longer were these two children of civilization. Their passion had swept them back into the immeasurable past; they were simply human beings deep in the simplest of human passions. They trembled all over with it.

Bruce understood now his unprovoked attack on the little boy when he had been taken from the orphanage on trial. The boy had been named Turner, and the name had been enough to recall a great and terrible hatred that he had learned in earliest babyhood. The name now recalled it again; the truth stood clear at last. It was the key to all the mystery of his life; it stirred him more than all of Linda's words. In an instant all the tragedy of his babyhood was recalled,—the hushed talk between his parents, the oaths, the flames in their eyes, and finally the body he had found lying so still beneath the pines. It was always the Turners, the dread name that had filled his baby days with horror. He hadn't understood then. It had been blind hatred,—hatred without understanding or self-analysis.

As she watched, his mountain blood mounted to the ascendancy. A strange transformation came over him. The gentleness that he had acquired in his years of city life began to fall away from him. The mountains were claiming him again.

It was not a mental change alone. It was a thing to be seen with the unaided eyes. His hand had swept through his hair, disturbing the part, and now the black locks dropped down on his forehead, almost to his eyes. The whole expression of his face seemed to change. His look of culture dropped from him; his eyes narrowed; he looked grotesquely out of place in his soft, well-tailored clothes.

But he was quite cold now. His passion was submerged under a steel exterior. His voice was cold and hard when he spoke.

"Then you and I are no relation whatever?"

"None."

"But we fight the same fight now."

"Yes. Until we both win—or both die."

Before he could speak again, a strange answer came out of the darkness. "Not two of you," a croaking old voice told them. It rose, shrill and cracked, from the shadows beyond the fire. They turned, and the moonlight showed a bent old figure hobbling toward them.

It was old Elmira, her cane tapping along in front of her; and something that caught the moonlight lay in the hollow of her left arm. Her eyes still glowed under the grizzled brows.

"Not two, but three," she corrected, in the hollow voice of uncounted years. In the magic of the moonlight it seemed quite fitting to both of them that she should have come. She was one of the triumvirate; they wondered why they had not missed her before. It was farther than she had walked in years, but her spirit had kept her up.

She put the glittering object that she carried into Bruce's hands. It was a rifle—a repeating breechloader of a famous make and a model of thirty years before. It was such a rifle as lives in legend, with sights as fine as a razor edge and an accuracy as great as light itself. Loving hands had polished it and kept it in perfect condition.

"Matthew Folger's rifle," the old woman explained, "for Matthew Folger's son."

And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth—as most men do, unless death cheats them first—and how he made a pact to pay old debts of death.

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