The crust over the volcano has shown itself to be even thinner than I imagined. The lava-shell gave way, under our very feet, and I’ve had a glimpse of the molten fury that can flow about us without our knowing it. And like so many of life’s tragic moments, it began out of something that is almost ridiculous in its triviality.

Night before last, when Struthers was rather late in setting her bread, she heard Minty scratching and whimpering at the back door, and without giving much thought to what she was doing, let him into the house. Minty, of course, went scampering up to Dinkie’s bed, where he slept secretly and joyously until morning. And all might have been well, even at this, had not Minty’s return to his kingdom gone to his head. To find some fitting way of expressing his joy must have taxed that brindle pup’s ingenuity, for, before any of us were up, he descended to the living-room, where he delightedly and diligently proceeded to remove the upholstery from the old Chesterfield. 179 By the time I came on the scene, at any rate, there was nothing but a grisly skeleton of the Chesterfield left. Now, that particular piece of furniture had known hard use, and there were places where the mohair had been worn through, and I’d even discussed the expediency of having the thing done over. But I knew that Minty’s efforts to hasten this movement would not meet with approval. So I discreetly decided to have Whinnie and Struthers remove the tell-tale skeleton to the bunk-house. Before that transfer could be effected, however, the Dour Man invaded the living-room and stood with a cold and accusatory eye inspecting that monument of destructiveness.

“Where’s Elmer?” he demanded, with a grim look which started by heart pounding.

“Elmer’s dressing,” I said as quietly as I could. “Do you want him?”

“I do,” announced my husband, whiter in the face than I had seen him for many a day.

“What for?” I asked.

“I think you know what for,” he said, meeting my eye.

“I’m not sure that I do,” I found the courage to retort. “But I’d prefer being certain.” 180

Duncan, instead of answering me, went to the foot of the stairs and called his son. Then he strode out of the room and out of the house. Struthers, in the meantime, circumspectly took possession of Minty, who was still indecorously shaking a bit of mohair between his jocund young teeth. She and Minty vanished from the scene. A moment later, however, Duncan walked back into the room. He had a riding-quirt in his hand.

“Where’s that boy?” he demanded.

I went out to the foot of the stairs, where I met Elmer coming down, buttoning his waist as he came. For just a moment his eye met mine. It was a questioning eye, but not a cowardly one. I had intended to speak to him, but my voice, for some reason, didn’t respond to my will. So I merely took the boy’s hand and led him into the living-room. There his father stood confronting him.

“Did that pup sleep on your bed last night?” demanded the man with the quirt.

“Yes,” said the child, after a moment of silence.

“Did you hear me say that no dog was to sleep in this house?” demanded the child’s father.

“Yes,” said Elmer, with his own face as white as his father’s. 181

“Then I think that’s about enough,” asserted Duncan, turning a challenging eye in my direction.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. My voice was shaking, in spite of myself.

“I’m going to whale that youngster within an inch of his life,” said the master of the house, with a deadly sort of intentness.

“I don’t want you to do that,” I quavered, wondering why my words, even as I uttered them, should seem so inadequate.

“Of course you don’t,” mocked my husband. “But this is the limit. And what you want isn’t going to count!”

“I don’t want you to do that,” I repeated. Something in my voice, I suppose, must have arrested him, for he stood there, staring at me, with a little knot coming and going on one side of his skull, just in front of his upper ear-tip.

“And why not?” he asked, still with that hateful rough ironic note in his voice.

“Because you don’t know what you’re punishing this child for,” I told him with all the quietness I could command. “And because you’re in no fit condition to do it.”

“You needn’t worry about my condition,” he cried 182 out—and I could see by the way he said it that he was still blind with rage. “Come here, you!” he called to Dinkie.

It was then that the fatal little bell clanged somewhere at the back of my head, the bell that rings down the curtain on all the slowly accumulated civilization the centuries may have brought to us. I not only faced my husband with a snort of scorn, but I tightened my grip on the child’s hand. I tightened my grip on his hand and backed slowly and deliberately away until I came to the door of my sewing-room. Then, still facing my husband, I opened that door and said: “Go inside, Dinkie.” I could not see the boy, but I knew that he had done as I told him. So I promptly slammed the door shut and stood there facing the gray-lipped man with the riding-quirt in his hand. He took two slow steps toward me. His chin was thrust out in a way that made me think of a fighting-cock’s beak. He had not shaved that morning, and his squared jaw looked stubbled and blue and ugly.

“You can’t pull that petticoat stuff this time,” he said in a hard and throaty tone which I had never heard from him before. “Get out of my way!”

“You will not beat that child!” And I myself 183 couldn’t have made a very pretty picture as I flung that challenge up in his teeth.

“Get out of my way,” he repeated. He did not shout it. He said it almost quietly. But I knew, even before he reached out a shaking hand to thrust me aside, that he was in deadly earnest, that nothing I could say would hold him back or turn him aside. And it was then that my eye fell on the big Colt in its stained leather holster, hanging up high over one corner of the book-cabinet, where it had been put beyond the reach of the children.

I have no memory of giving any thought to the matter. My reaction must have been both immediate and automatic. I don’t think I even intended to bunt my husband in the short-ribs the way I did, for the impact of my body half twisted him about and sent him staggering back several steps. All I know is that holster and belt came tumbling down as I sprang and caught at the Colt handle. And I was back at the door before I had even shaken the revolver free. I was back just in time to hear my husband say, rather foolishly, for the third time: “Get out of my way!”

“You stay back there!” I called, quite as foolishly, for by this time I had the Colt balanced in my hand and was pointing it directly at his body. 184

He stopped short, with a vacuous look in his eyes.

“You fool!” he said, in a sort of strangled whisper. But it was my face, and not the weapon, that he was staring at all the while.

“Stay back!” I said again, with my eyes fixed on his.

He hesitated, for a moment, and made a sound that was like the short bark of a laugh. It was too hard and horrible, though, ever to be taken for laughter. And I knew that he was not going to do what I had said.

“Stay back!” I warned him still again. But he stepped forward, with a grim sort of deliberation, with his challenging gaze locked on mine. I could hear a thousand warning voices, somewhere at the back of my brain, and at the same time I could hear a thousand singing devils in my blood trying to drown out those voices. I could see my husband’s narrowed eyes slowly widen, slowly open like the gills of a dying fish, for the hate that he must have seen on my face obviously arrested him. It arrested him, but it arrested him only for a moment. He dropped his eyes to the Colt in my hand. Then he moved deliberately forward until his body was almost against the barrel-end. I must have known what it 185 meant, just as he must have known what it meant. It was his final challenge. And I must have met that challenge. For, without quite knowing it, I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.

There had been something awful, I know, in that momentary silence. And there was something awful in the sound that came after it, though it was not the sound my subconscious mind was waiting for. It was distinct enough and significant enough, heaven knows. But instead of the explosion of a shell it was the sharp snap of steel against steel.

The revolver was empty. It was empty-had been empty for weeks. But the significant fact remained that I had deliberately pulled the trigger. I had stood ready, in my moment of madness, to kill the man that I lived with....

Had a ball of lead gone through that man’s body, I don’t think he could have staggered back with a more startled expression on his face. He looked more than bewildered; he looked vaguely humiliated, oddly and wordlessly affronted, as he stood leaning against the table-edge, breathing hard, his skin a mottled blue-white to the very lips. He made an effort to speak, but no sound came from him. For a moment the dreadful thought raced through me that 186 I had indeed shot him, that in some mysterious way he was mortally hurt, without this particular bullet announcing itself as bullets usually do. I looked at the revolver, stupidly. It seemed to have grown heavy, as heavy as a cook-stove in my hand.

“You’d do that?” whispered my husband, very slowly, with a stricken light in his eyes which I couldn’t quite understand. I intended to put the Colt on the table. But something must have been wrong with my vision, for the loathsome thing fell loathsomely to the floor. I felt sick and shaken and a horrible misty feeling of homelessness settled down about me, of a sudden, for I remembered how closely I had skirted the black gulf of murder.

“Oh, Dinky-Dunk!” I blubbered, weakly, as I groped toward him. He must have thought that I was going to fall, for he put out his arm and held me up. He held me up, but there wasn’t an atom of warmth in his embrace. He held me up about the same as he’d hold up an open wheat-sack that threatened to tumble over on his granary floor. I don’t know what reaction it was that took my strength away from me, but I clung to his shoulders and sobbed there. I felt as alone in the gray wastes of time as one of Gershom’s lost stars. And I knew that 187 my Dinky-Dunk would never bend down now and whisper into my ear any word of comfort, any word of forgiveness. For, however things may have been at the first, I was the one who was now so hopelessly in the wrong, I was the big offender. And that knowledge only added to my misery as I stood there clinging to my husband’s shoulders and blubbering “Oh, Dinky-Dunk!”

It must have grown distasteful to him, my foolish hanging on to him as though he were a hitching-post, for he finally said in a remote voice: “I guess we’ve had about enough of this.” He led me rather ceremoniously to a chair, and slowly let me down in it. Then he crossed over to the old leather holster and picked it up, and stooped for the revolver, and pushed it down in the holster and buckled the cover-flap and tossed the whole thing up to the top of the book-cabinet again. Then, without speaking to me, he walked slowly out of the room.

I was tempted to call him back, but I knew, on second thought, that it would be no use. I merely sat there, staring ahead of me. Then I shut my eyes and tried to think. I don’t know why, but I was thinking about the bigness of Betelgeuse, which was twenty-seven million times as big as our sun and 188 which was going on through its millions of miles of space without knowing anything about Chaddie McKail and what had happened to her that morning. I was wondering if there were worlds between me and Betelgeuse with women on them, with women as alone as I was, when I felt a pair of small arms tighten about my knees and an adoring small voice whispered “Mummsy!” And I forgot about Betelgeuse. For it was my Dinkie there, with his little rough hand reaching hungrily for mine....

Minty has been removed from Casa Grande. I took him over to the Teetzel ranch in the car, and young Dode Teetzel is to get a dollar a week for looking after him and feeding him. Only Elmer and I know of his whereabouts. And once a week the boy can canter over on Buntie and keep in touch with his pup.

We have a tacit understanding that the occurrences of yesterday morning are a closed chapter, are not to be referred to by word or deed. Duncan himself found it necessary to team in to Buckhorn and left word with Struthers that he would stay in town over night. The call for the Buckhorn trip was, of course, a polite fabrication, an expedient pax in bello to permit the dust of battle to settle a little about 189 this troubled house of McKail. All day to-day I have felt rather languid. I suppose it’s the lethargy which naturally follows after all violence. Any respectable woman, I used to think, could keep a dead-line in her soul, beyond which the impulses of evil dare not venture. But I must have been wrong.... All week I’ve been looking for a letter from Peter Ketley. But for once in his life he seems to have forgotten us.