“Come in and sit down a moment,” he said in a somewhat embarrassed way.
“This suggestion of our driving together is in line with your kind
invitation for last night. I see I must explain somehow.”
He offered me a cigar and though I seldom smoke in the morning, I took
it, for, I thought smoking would fill up the silences I anticipated.
He puffed a while, in fact.
“Have you ever been among feudists in the mountains?” he queried.
“More than a little,” I told him.
“Likely enough then,” he went on, “you know more about their ways
than I do. But I saw something of them myself, before I left America.
Did you ever notice how a man at either focus of a feud, the king-pin
of his end of it so to speak, manifests the greatest care to avoid
permitting others to expose themselves to any degree of the danger
always menacing him; how such men, in the black shadow of doom, as
it were, are solicitous to prevent outsiders from straying into the
penumbra of the eclipse which threatens themselves?”
“I have observed that,” I replied.
“Have you noticed on the other hand,” he continued, “that they never
show any concern for acquaintances who comprehend the situation, but
pay them the compliment of assuming that they have sense enough to know
what they are doing and to take care of themselves?”
“I have observed that same too,” I affirmed.
He puffed again for a while.
“My father,” he returned presently, “used to say that there are two
ends to a quarrel, the right end and the wrong end, but that either end
of a feud is the wrong end. I am one end of a feud. Wherever I am is
one focus of that feud. The other focus is local, and I have removed
myself as far as may be from it. But I am not safe here, should not
be safe anywhere on earth; doubt if I should be safe on the moon, or
Mars, on a planet of some other sun, or the least conspicuous satellite
of the farthest star. I am obnoxious to the hate of a power as
far-reaching” ... he took off his broad felt hat and looked up at the
canvas of the tent-roof ... “as far-reaching as the displeasure of God.”
“And as implacable,” he almost whispered. “As the malice of Satan.”
He looked sane, healthy and self-possessed.
“I am nowhere safe,” he recommenced in his natural voice, “while my
chief adversary is alive. My enemies are many and malignant enough,
but their power is negligible, and their malignancy vicarious. Without
fomenting their hostility would evaporate. Could I but know that my
chief enemy were no more I should be free from all alarm. But while
that arch-foe survives I am liable to attack at any moment, to attacks
so subtle that I am at a loss to make you comprehend their possible
nature, so crude that I could not make you realize the danger you are
in at this instant.”