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Updated: June 14, 2025
It was fully two hours after supper when he returned. Malcolm, Dade, and Bob had gone to bed. In the kitchen, sitting beside the table, on which was a spotlessly clean tablecloth, with dishes set for one she had saved Calumet's supper, and it was steaming in the warming-closet of the stove Betty sat. She was mending Bob's stockings, and thinking of her life during the past few months and Calumet.
Its head had been partly severed from its body and while she looked Calumet's pistol roared again and its destruction was completed. She was suddenly faint; the world reeled again. But the sensation passed quickly and she saw Calumet standing close to her, looking at her with grim disapprobation. Apparently he had forgotten his danger in his excitement over hers.
But the black suffered Calumet's advances, his authority, his autocratic commands, with a patience that indicated that his subjugation was to be complete and lasting.
For a moment there was a painful silence, which Malcolm broke by clearing his throat, his gaze on the tablecloth. "Sometimes I think Betty's a little fresh," he said, apologetically. "She's sorta sudden-like. She hadn't ought to " He looked up to see a malevolent scowl on Calumet's face, and he ducked by the narrowest of margins the heavy plate that flew from Calumet's hand.
Metallic, venomous and filled with a threat of death came Calumet's voice. "You sufferin' fool!" he said, the words writhing through his lips, his eyes blazing. "It's my game, do you hear? An' if you gas another word about it I'll tear you apart!" "He was blackguardin' Betty," objected Dade, his face ashen, but his spirit still undaunted. "He was blackguardin' her an' you made friends with him.
A bullet from Calumet's pistol struck the rock, glanced from it and seared the back of his hand, bringing a curse to his lips. "Told you so," came Calumet's voice. "I hope it ain't nothin' serious. But I'm gettin' my hand in."
Calumet's hat had come off during the first series of bucks. The grin that had been on his face when he had got into the saddle back near the corral fence was gone, had been superseded by a grimness that Betty could see even from the distance from which she watched. He was a rider though, she saw that had seen it from the first.
He looked from one to the other, not seeming to entirely comprehend the significance of the command, and then he saw the gleam in Betty's eyes, the derisive enjoyment in Dade's, the implacable glint in Calumet's, knowledge burst upon him in a sudden, sickening flood and his face paled. He looked at Calumet, the look of a trapped animal. "Get goin'!" said the latter; "we're all waitin'."
Taggart climbed down from his pony and stood beside it. "Half-an'-half on the idol," he said. "That's square, ain't it?" He looked at Calumet with the beginning of a bland smile, which instantly faded and turned into a grimace of fear as he found himself looking into the gaping muzzles of Calumet's pistols, which had appeared with magic ease and quickness.
Still others merely stared at Garvey and Calumet, unable to account for the latter's mild submission to this unallowed liberty. The proprietor alone, remembering a certain gleam in Calumet's eyes on a former occasion, looked at him now and saw deep in his eyes a slumbering counterpart to it, and discreetly retired to the far end of the bar, where there was a whiskey barrel in front of him.
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