made a gesture of
cruelty. "Clint right or wrong? There ain't no question of that. My boy
wasn't the kind to be in the wrong. What did he ever do but what was
right? If Clint was in the wrong I'd kill Greevy jest the same, for
Greevy robbed him of all the years that was before him--only a sapling
he was, an' all his growin' to do, all his branches to widen an' his
roots to spread. But that don't enter in it, his bein' in the wrong.
It was a quarrel, and Clint never did Greevy any harm. It was a quarrel
over cards, an' Greevy was drunk, an' followed Clint out into the
prairie in the night and shot him like a coyote. Clint hadn't no chance,
an' he jest lay there on the ground till morning, when Ricketts and
Steve Joicey found him. An' Clint told Ricketts who it was."

"Why didn't Ricketts tell it right out at once?" asked Sinnet.

"Greevy was his own cousin--it was in the family, an' he kept thinkin'
of Greevy's gal, Em'ly. Her--what'll it matter to her! She'll get
married, an she'll forgit. I know her, a gal that's got no deep feelin'
like Clint had for me. But because of her Ricketts didn't speak for a
year. Then he couldn't stand it any longer, an' he told me--seein' how I
suffered, an' everybody hidin' their suspicions from me, an' me up here
out o' the way, an' no account. That was the feelin' among 'em--what was
the good of making things worse! They wasn't thinkin' of the boy or of
Jim Buckmaster, his father. They was thinkin' of Greevy's gal--to save
her trouble."

Sinnet's face was turned towards Juniper Bend, and the eyes were
fixed, as it were, on a still more distant object--a dark, brooding,
inscrutable look.

"Was that all Ricketts told you, Buck?" The voice was very quiet, but it
had a suggestive note.

"That's all Clint told Bill before he died. That was enough."

There was a moment's pause, and then, puffing out long clouds of smoke,
and in a tone of curious detachment, as though he were telling of
something that he saw now in the far distance, or as a spectator of a
battle from a far vantage-point might report to a blind man standing
near, Sinnet said:

"P'r'aps Ricketts didn't know the whole story; p'r'aps Clint didn't know
it all to tell him; p'r'aps Clint didn't remember it all. P'r'aps he
didn't remember anything except that he and Greevy quarrelled, and that
Greevy and he shot at each other in the prairie. He'd only be thinking
of the thing that mattered most to him--that his life was over,