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Updated: June 23, 2025
Her man was a fighting man, then only he was not a madman. He was the sort of fighter who did not lose his head. But she could not picture him as a man skilled in the brutal work of killing. He was too deliberate, too scrupulous, for that sort of work. And Fectnor was neither deliberate nor scrupulous.
"You watched him go?" "When he came into the saloon, like a rock out of a sling, he stopped just long enough to grin, and fling out this to me 'If you want to see a funny sight, go out front. Fectnor never did like me, anyway. Then he scuttled back and out. I followed to see what was the matter. He made straight for the bridge road. He was sprinting. He's gone." Harboro's gun had disappeared.
He seemed actually to believe that none must deny him the things he wanted. He seemed an insane creature when you thwarted him. There was something terrible about his rages. She imagined seemingly impossible things: that Fectnor would come to the house perhaps while Harboro was there. He might kill Harboro.
And afterward.... Ah, she must find Fectnor! She retraced her steps. At a shop where silks were sold she entered. She asked for a piece of ribbon. A particular shade of blue; she could not describe it. She sat on a stool at the counter and kept an eye on the street.... No, something darker than that, something less lustrous.
And that look of callous complacence was scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not uttered a word. And yet Sylvia could not regard herself as being really helpless. That door into her father's room: while it held, her father could not come to her, but she could go to her father. She had only to wait until Fectnor was off his guard, and touch the bolt and make her escape.
He could see that Fectnor was not a coward, no matter what else he was; and he realized that this man would seek to enrage him further, so that his eyes would be blinded, so that his hands would tremble. "I'm going to kill you, Fectnor," Harboro continued. "But I'm going to give you a chance for your life. I want you to turn and walk down the street twelve paces. Then turn and draw.
But the truth, as to how on the night before Fectnor had trapped her and wronged her in her father's house, she told. She knew that Harboro would never have permitted her to rest if she had not told him; she knew that she must have gone mad if she had not unbosomed herself to this man who was as the only tree in the desert of her life.
He belonged to the States, somewhere, but he would come back by way of El Paso, if he ever came back; or he would drift over toward Vera Cruz or Tampico. Fectnor was one of those who had trod that path through the mesquite to Sylvia's back door in the days which were ended. But he was different from the others.
He would defend himself in the face of any danger; he would defend that which belonged to him. And Fectnor was cruel and unscrupulous and cunning. He knew how to provoke quarrels and to gain advantages. She grew cold at the thought of losing Harboro. The inevitable consequences of such a loss occurred to her. She would have to submit always to Fectnor as long as he willed it.
After all, they had been arguing about things which did not matter now. "Fectnor," she said, "I'm sure there must be a good deal of justice in what you say. But I know you're forgetting that when the man and the woman are through with youth there is a reckoning which gives the man all the best of it. His wrong-doing isn't stamped upon him. He is respected. He may be poor, but he isn't shunned."
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