“It is Lew Taliaferro, and if you think I am going to let what’s left of the Glass Slipper go to him for nothing you can have another think.”

But she shook her head; that was not what she wanted to talk about. She unlocked the door of her house and let him in, watching him with her black eyes as he entered. Then she moved to stand across the table from him, as though it were necessary to have something between them.

“What’s bothering, Kate?”

“Clay was here. He said he had killed another one being too quick on the draw. I want to know what—”

“He said what?”

She repeated it. He stared back at her and slowly he took off his hat and dropped it on the table, and brushed a hand back over his head. “Why did he come here?” he asked.

“He came to ask the deputy if he had lied about what Schroeder told him — there was something about Miss Jessie Marlow being mistaken. But I want to know what he meant about Bob Cletus! Tom, what did he mean, he’d been too quick on the draw?”

He hardly listened; he felt a rage at Jessie Marlow that filled him until he thought he would burst with it, then pity and rage for Clay, who had killed Curley Burne wrongfully now by his lights — one time wrong, and every time wrong after it, Clay had said. More and more, it seemed, everyone looked upon Clay as only a name, a thing, a machine to which they fed their pennies and out of him came the same trick which they could then class good or bad for their amusement. Even Miss Jessie Marlow; he knew she had done it to Clay without even wondering how she had. Talked him into going back to marshaling, for one thing. God damn her to hell! There was no one but Tom Morgan to see the man inside the machine any more.

But Kate was not interested in Curley Burne or Miss Jessie Marlow; she was interested in Bob Cletus.

“I don’t know what he meant, Kate,” he said. “Why didn’t you ask him?”

“What did he mean, Tom?” She hit her fist on the table, and then she leaned on it heavily and the feather swayed on her hat. She looked suddenly as though she were going to break apart. “Now I don’t know! Don’t you see? Now I—” She got control of herself with an effort. “Tom,” she said. “Tell me the truth about what happened!”

“Told you and told you, but you won’t believe me. Cletus called out Clay over Nicholson.”

“Bob didn’t care anything for Nicholson! I know that!”

He shrugged. “You are going to believe Clay shot him down because I asked him to, whatever I say.”

He watched her face crumple. He could smile as he told the truth; “I didn’t tell Clay to shoot him down. I wouldn’t have if I’d wanted him shot down, for Clay wouldn’t have done it.” And he leaned toward her and said, “Kate, I wish you had gone and married Bob Cletus and that I’d given you away to the happy bridegroom. And that you were fat as a pig and worn out right now cooking chuck for him and all his hands on that spread he had, and a couple of dozen children. Don’t you believe I wish it?”

He heard her make a high sound in her throat. “What did Clay mean by that, Tom?” she whispered hopelessly.

“Ask him. But let me ask you something. What are you up to with the deputy, Kate? A person would think you had a thing on about somebody whose brother Clay shot. Are you trying to make something out of it?”

She shook her head a little; her eyes were swollen. “No. Nothing. I can’t make anything with anybody, for you would just have him killed. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know which way you mean that. One way I might.” He sat down and leaned his chair back and crossed his boots up on the table. She was staring at him with her red lips half open.

“Let me tell you something straight and for all, Kate,” he said, and he spoke as seriously as he had ever spoken in his life. He pointed a finger at her. “There have been damned few people I have ever thought anything of. Maybe only two, when it comes down to it. And those I have never thrown down and never will.”

“Two!” she cried. “Do you mean me? You crucified me!”

“Why, Kate, you’d been a whore and it was your own doing. No mac brought you to it. I thought you figured the way I did, and whoring is a way to make a stake like any other. I didn’t know you were going to be so damned delicate about it. A person is what they are and what’s there to be ashamed of?”

“I didn’t mean that!”

“Oh, you meant Cletus. Well, there is no point talking if you are going to hold I put Clay to that.”

“You can’t even look at me and say you didn’t!”

He looked at her and said he hadn’t. He wondered suddenly if he would have done it any differently if he had known he was never going to have Kate back, whatever. “I was saying,” he said, “that there have been a couple I held high like that. One was you, the other is Clay. I suppose you wouldn’t understand that, being a quarter-breed bitch, but it is so.”

He paused and gazed back into her wide eyes and saw her mouth open again, as though she would speak again. But she did not, and he went on. “And I am talking about Clay now, for you have gone your way and it’s not mine. I call Clay friend and I don’t know that I’ve ever had another. Do you know what a friend means? I don’t expect you do, for all you’ve known is a bunch of other whores you thought poorly of, and said so. I call Clay friend, and I don’t give a damn that some go around holding him up as God’s salvation to this country, and others call him a dirty dog of a killer. And I don’t expect it makes much of a damn to him either what everybody thinks of me.”

He pointed his finger at her again. “Now, that is a thing that is just so, whether you understand it or not, which I expect you don’t. But that holds strong with me. Now let me tell you some more. There are people who are trying to throw him down. I am speaking in particular of you, and maybe your deputy. And McQuown. And there are others, like Miss Jessie Marlow, though I don’t expect she thinks she is. Now: I think I will see Clay Blaisedell die, like I told you once. For that is the trade he is in. But I intend to see that he dies decently, and his name held good, and honor to him. Though not the same way some others want it. Listen to me: I will stick with him and try to do in every backshooter there is, and I mean you among them, and Gannon, if you two are up to something. And McQuown; and all. You want to see him die, in your woman-meanness, but I will fight you down the line. Maybe you will think you have won when he is dead, but I will win too, for I will see he goes down in the end like he wants to.”

Again she started to speak, again he leveled the finger at her. “There is nothing I have ever set myself to do yet I haven’t done. Hear me and think if it isn’t so. And this is what I have set myself to. I will see it through in spite of every son of a bitch in the world against it. I will kill anybody I think is dangerous to him that way. Or get killed for it either without giving one good God damn, if it would do any good. Do you understand me, Kate?”

“Tom,” she said shakily. “I don’t want to hear anything more about it. I don’t—”

“Just one more thing,” he said. His throat felt very dry. “Listen. There is going to come a day when I cash in. When I get up to the Gate they will look at the records, like they do. They will scream to see mine. But I will say to them that I was made the way I was, but I did a decent thing in my life. And I don’t know that there are so many decent things done that they can sniff at it. I can say I did this, and by God I did my best, and it was a good thing. I can say I had a reason to be, and I don’t see many around me that have. I can say I had a reason for being alive that was mine, and that was worth something, and—”

“I have got my reason to be!” Kate cried, but he felt a vast triumph as her voice broke.