' helped me. But
anything's better'n goin' back to that hell where I been the last
two years. Go on! Why don't you shoot?"

"You wanted to make Partridgeville and see--_who_?"

"My mother--and my wife."

"Have you got a mother? Have you got a--wife?"

"Yes, and three kids. Why don't you shoot?"

It seemed an eon that they stood so. The McBride woman was trying to
find the nerve to fire. She could not. In that instant she made a
discovery that many luckless souls make too late: _to kill a man_ is
easy to talk about, easy to write about. But to stand deliberately
face to face with a fellow-human--alive, pulsing, breathing, fearing,
hoping, loving, living,--point a weapon at him that would take his
life, blot him from the earth, negate twenty or thirty years of
childhood, youth, maturity, and make of him in an instant--nothing!
--that is quite another matter.

He was helpless before her now. Perhaps the expression on his face
had something to do with the sudden revulsion that halted her finger.
Facing certain death, some of the evil in those crooked eyes seemed
to die out, and the terrible personality of the man to fade.
Regardless of her danger, regardless of what he would have done to
her if luck had not turned the tables, Cora McBride saw before her
only a lone man with all society's hand against him, realizing he
had played a bad game to the limit and lost, two big tears creeping
down his unshaved face, waiting for the end.

"Three children!" she whispered faintly.

"Yes."

"You're going back to see them?"

"Yes, and my mother. Mother'd help me get to Canada--somehow."

Cora McBride had forgotten all about the five thousand dollars. She
was stunned by the announcement that this man had relatives--a mother,
a wife, _three_ babies. The human factor had not before occurred to
her. Murderers! They have no license to let their eyes well with
tears, to have wives and babies, to possess mothers who will help
them get to Canada regardless of what their earthly indiscretions
may have been.

At this revelation the gun-point wavered. The sight of those tears
on his face sapped her will-power even as a wound in her breast
might have drained her life-blood.

Her great moment had been given her. She was letting it slip away.
She had her reward in her hand for the mere pulling of a trigger and
no incrimination for the result. For a bit of human sentiment she
was bungling the situation unpardonably, fatally.

Why d