THE KILLING OF "SWEETWATER"
speak it was in a low, concentrated voice, which was hard to follow. He spoke as if he was speaking to himself.
"I ain't forgotten it. It has bin a red-hot sore on my mind all these long years, even when I was happiest with my dear, dead wife. She got to know of it, for I told her the truth once, when she thought I was wearied after the old life of the prairie. God knows that, for all her love, I did hanker some to see the sun rise up in these clean places of the earth, but it warn't that that made me restless and uneasy. Hale had a notion how it was with me when I was goin' back to marry her, and he played on it and let his native beastliness out on me, knowin' that I would do aught rather than die before I had lived. For then the love I bore her that is dead was all my life, and I never knowed that the time would come once more when the open earth and the big prairies of Texas and Arizona would call to me like a deserted child. I took the blow that he gave me, for, with things as they was just then, if I had killed him, I'd hev had to pay for it to the law; for I had
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