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Updated: May 25, 2025
"Of course, I beg your pardon, Mr. Acton," came the confused reply. "I should like to see the ranch. I may I will That is, if I " He stopped as if not knowing how to finish, and with a gesture of hopelessness turned away to stand silently looking back toward the town, while his face was dark with painful memories, and his lips curved in that mirthless, self-mocking smile.
A will tardily developed, if all accounts of his school and college days were true, but now, as she believed, invincible; a mystic; an ascetic; a man under whose modest or careless or self-mocking ways she, with her eye for character, divined the most critical instincts, and a veracity, iron, scarcely human a man before whom one must be always posing at one's best that was a personal risk too great to take for a Julie Le Breton.
"I am afraid I have," returned Patches, with his old self-mocking smile. "But, look here, Phil, you are disturbed and all wrought up about something, or you wouldn't attack me like this. You don't really think me a suspicious character, and you know you don't.
Perhaps he was thinking of that clump of bushes on the mountain side. Joe, loosing his riata from the horse's neck, and coiling it carefully, considered a moment. Then: "You ain't goin' to walk to the Cross-Triangle, be you?" That self-mocking smile touched the man's lips; but there was a hint of decisive purpose in his voice as he answered, "Oh, yes."
How miraculously beautiful must be that system which makes wine out of the scorching tears of guilt; and from the suffocating suspense, the agonized fear, the compelled and self-mocking bravery, the awful sentence, the despairing death-pang of one man, furnishes the smirking expectation of fees, the jovial meeting, and the mercenary holiday to another!
For a few moments longer the strange man stood in the glade, listening to the vanishing sounds of their going, while that mirthless, self-mocking smile curved his lips. "Poor devil!" he muttered sadly, as he turned at last to make his way back to his horse. "Poor Joe! I know just how he feels. It's hard it's beastly hard to break away."
"He reminds me of of some one I know," he finished, with his old, self-mocking smile. "I have a fellow feeling for him, the same as you have for that wild horse, you know. I'd like to take him away from Nick, and see if it would be possible to make a real man of him," he mused, more to himself than to his companion.
"I cannot be forced." The preacher still maintained some dignity, but he had grown pale. "I can force you. Get ready now!... Joan, come here!" Kells spoke sternly, yet something of the old, self-mocking spirit was in his tone. His intelligence was deriding the flesh and blood of him, the beast, the fool. It spoke that he would have his way and that the choice was fatal for him.
But before her sudden change of countenance he had been quick to add: "Oh, madame, I am full conscious of the charity that brings you, and I am deeply, deeply grateful; but " "Charity?" she had interrupted sharply, on a laugh that was self-mocking. "Charity?" "What else, madame?" "Ask yourself," she had answered, reddening and averting her face from his questioning eyes.
He smiled again that mirthless, self-mocking smile, as he added without giving her time to speak, "If you will excuse me for a moment, I will rid your camp of the unwelcome presence of that beast yonder." Then he went toward his horse, as though turning for relief to the work that had become so familiar to him.
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