"What else? To kill--never to stop killing--one after another until they
are gone! Till Simon Turner and the whole Turner clan have paid the
debts they owe."
Bruce recoiled as if from a blow. "Turner? Did you say Turner?" he asked
hoarsely.
"Yes. That's the clan's name. I thought you knew."
There was an instant of strange truce. Both stood motionless. The scene
no longer seemed part of the world that men have come to know in these
latter years,--a land of cities and homes and peaceful twilights over
quiet countrysides. The moon was still strange and white in the sky; the
pines stood tall and dark and sad,--eternal emblems of the wilderness.
The fire had burned down to a few lurid coals glowing in the gray ashes.
No longer were these two children of civilization. Their passion had
swept them back into the immeasurable past; they were simply human
beings deep in the simplest of human passions. They trembled all over
with it.
Bruce understood now his unprovoked attack on the little boy when he had
been taken from the orphanage on trial. The boy had been named Turner,
and the name had been enough to recall a great and terrible hatred that
he had learned in earliest babyhood. The name now recalled it again; the
truth stood clear at last. It was the key to all the mystery of his
life; it stirred him more than all of Linda's words. In an instant all
the tragedy of his babyhood was recalled,--the hushed talk between his
parents, the oaths, the flames in their eyes, and finally the body he
had found lying so still beneath the pines. It was always the Turners,
the dread name that had filled his baby days with horror. He hadn't
understood then. It had been blind hatred,--hatred without understanding
or self-analysis.
As she watched, his mountain blood mounted to the ascendancy. A strange
transformation came over him. The gentleness that he had acquired in his
years of city life began to fall away from him. The mountains were
claiming him again.
It was not a mental change alone. It was a thing to be seen with the
unaided eyes. His hand had swept through his hair, disturbing the part,
and now the black locks dropped down on his forehead, almost to his
eyes. The whole expression of his face seemed to change. His look of
culture dropped from him; his eyes narrowed; he looked grotesquely out
of place in his soft, well-tailored clothes.
But he was quite cold now. His passion was submerged under a steel
exterior. His voice was cold and hard when he spoke.
"Then you and I are no relation whatever?"
"None."
"But we fight the same fight now."
"Yes. Until we both win--or both die."
Before he could speak again, a strange answer came out of the darkness.
"Not two of you," a croaking old voice told them. It rose, shrill and
cracked, from the shadows beyond the fire. They turned, and the
moonlight showed a bent old figure hobbling toward them.
It was old Elmira, her cane tapping along in front of her; and something
that caught the moonlight lay in the hollow of her left arm. Her eyes
still glowed under the grizzled brows.
"Not two, but three," she corrected, in the hollow voice of uncounted
years. In the magic of the moonlight it seemed quite fitting to both of
them that she should have come. She was one of the triumvirate; they
wondered why they had not missed her before. It was farther than she had
walked in years, but her spirit had kept her up.
She put the glittering object that she carried into Bruce's hands. It
was a rifle--a repeating breechloader of a famous make and a model of
thirty years before. It was such a rifle as lives in legend, with sights
as fine as a razor edge and an accuracy as great as light itself. Loving
hands had polished it and kept it in perfect condition.
"Matthew Folger's rifle," the old woman explained, "for Matthew Folger's
son."
And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth--as most
men do, unless death cheats them first--and how he made a pact to pay
old debts of death.