hem?"

"I'll tell them that I've come back from following after new gods. I'll
tell them that the blood of my forefathers hasn't grown cold in me, and
that if they follow me, tonight they will see 'Little' Jim avenged." He
paused an instant before adding passionately, "Not by a single man or a
couple, but with as many filthy lives as it takes to balance one decent
life."

CHAPTER XXXIX

As Anne Masters stood in the narrow doorway of the room where lay the
dead body of "Little" Jim Bartleton, she seemed to lose her hold on
modernity and to stand a hostage to the forces and emotions of the
mediaeval.

The fire rose and fell and flickered. It snapped and sighed, roared and
whispered, and with it the shadow of the sheeted figure and silhouette
of the uncovered face grew and lessened in grotesque fluctuation.

Before she could begin her struggle with the man whose face wore little
promise of conversion, she must conquer the struggle in herself, for
suddenly she had need to defend her own feelings against the currents of
thought that swayed him, and the role of righteous avenger no longer
seemed so indefensible.

"Boone," she said, with an effort at convincing steadiness, yet feeling
weak of will beside the set determination of his bearing, "I've come a
long way to talk with you. Will you listen?"

His bow was that of compulsory assent, but his eyes showed defiant
through their enforced courtesy.

"I'm listening," he said, "though when I asked you to listen, and
everything we'd planned our lives for depended on your hearing me, you
refused. Yet that was different, I suppose. After all, I'm only partly
educated in the ways of polite society. I haven't learned to be casual
in such things."

"If you're a barbarian now," she told him quietly, "it's from pure
choice. Gentlemen have taught you their code. You've been a gentleman
yourself."

Boone laughed.

"Cleopatra, I believe, had pet leopards that were allowed to purr on the
steps of her throne. But they were only a part of the picture and they
didn't quite become gentlemen. You let me be a pet leopard, too--for a
while. Now I've gone back to the jungle."

She ignored the reference to herself. That way lay endless dispute, and
this battle to avert feudal tragedies, she thought, was not a thing to
be fought on a field of personalities. She spoke slowly and with a
dignity that made his cheeks redden to the realization of his own bitter
facetiousness. "I ca