rs?"

McGuire managed to haul himself upright in his chair, staring up at
Peter with bloodshot eyes.

"He's lied to you, if he said I done it----," he gasped, relapsing into
the vernacular of an earlier day. "It was Hawk. He stabbed him in the
back. I never touched him. I never had a thing to do with the killin'. I
swear it----"

Peter's lips set in a thin line.

"So Hawk Kennedy killed Ben Cameron!" he said.

"He did. I swear to God----"

"And then _you_ cleared out with all the water, leaving Hawk to die.
_That_ was murder--cold-blooded murder----"

"My God, don't, Nichols!" the old man moaned. "If you only knew----"

"Well, then--tell me the truth."

Their glances met. Peter's was compelling. He had, when he chose, an air
of command. And there was something else in Peter's look, inflexible as
it was, that gave McGuire courage, an unalterable honesty which had been
so far tried and not found wanting.

"You know--already," he stammered.

"Tell me your story," said Peter bluntly.

There was a long moment of hesitation, and then,

"Get me a drink, Nichols. I'll trust you. I've never told it to a living
man. I'll tell--I'll tell it all. It may not be as bad as you think."

He drank the liquor at a gulp and set the glass down on the table beside
him.

"This--this thing has been hanging over me for fifteen years,
Nichols--fifteen years. It's weighted me down, made an old man of me
before my time. Maybe it will help me to tell somebody. It's made me
hard--silent, busy with my own affairs, bitter against every man who
could hold his head up. I knew it was going to come some day. I knew it.
You can't pull anything like that and get away with it forever. I'd made
the money for my kids--I never had any fun spending it in my life. I'm a
lonely man, Nichols. I always was. No happiness except when I came back
to my daughters--to Peggy and my poor Marjorie...."

McGuire was silent for a moment and Peter, not taking his gaze from his
face, patiently waited. McGuire glanced at him just once and then went
on, slipping back from time to time into the speech of a bygone day.

"I never knew what his first name was. He was always just 'Hawk' to us
boys on the range. Hawk Kennedy was a bad lot. I knew it up there in the
San Luis valley but I wasn't no angel from Heaven myself. And he had a
way with him. We got on all right together. But when the gold mine up at
the Gap petered out he quit me--got beaten up in a fight ab