Standing among the hanging clothes, the light strong on their faces, they seemed to strike him at first as ghosts. He stared at them aghast, and recoiled. Then the old ghosts smiled and stepped forward with open arms. But he recoiled again, and his welcome to his far-come, heart-hungry parents was a groan. They saw that he had a revolver in his hand. His eyes recurred to it, and he turned here and there for a place to lay it, but seemed unable to let it go. His mother flung forward and threw her arms about him, her lips pursed to kiss him, but he turned away with lowered eyes. His father took him by the shoulders and said: "Why, what's the matter, boy? Ain't you glad to see your Maw--and me?" For answer he only breathed hard and chokingly. His eyes went to the revolver again, then roved here and there, always as if searching for a place to hide it. "Give that thing to me, Steve," the old man said. And he took it in his hands, forcing from the cold steel the colder fingers that clung as if frozen about the handle. Once he was free of the weapon, the boy toppled into a chair, his mother still clasping him desperately. The old man knew something about firearms. He found the spring, broke the revolver, and looked into the cylinder. In every chamber was the round eye of a cartridge. Three of them bore the little scar of the firing-pin. Old Coburn leaned hard against the wall. He looked about for a place to hide the horrible machine, but he, too, could not let go of it. His mouth was full of the ashes of life. He would have been glad to drop dead. But beyond the sick, clammy face of his son he saw the face of his wife, an old face, a mother's face, witless with bewilderment. The old man swallowed hard. "What's happened, Steve? What's been goin' on?" The young man only shook his head, ran his dry tongue along his lips, tore a piece of loose skin from the lower one with his teeth, and breathed noisily through nostrils that worked like a dog's. He pushed his mother's hands away as if they irked him. The old man could have struck him to the ground for that roughness, but the prayers in the mother's eyes restrained him. "Better tell us, Steve. Maybe we might help you." The young man's head worked as if he were gulping at a hard lump; his lips moved without sound, his gaze leaped from place to place, lighting everywhere but on his father's waiting, watching eyes, and always coming back to the revolver with a loathing fascination. At last he spoke, in a whisper like the rasp of chafed husks: "I had to do it. He deserved it." The mother had not seen the nicks on the cartridges, but she needed no such evidence. She wailed: "You don't mean that you--no--no--you didn't k-kill-ill-ill--" The word rattled in her throat, and she went to the floor like a toppling bolster. It was the old man that lifted her face from the rug, ran to fetch water, and knelt to restore her. The son just wavered in his chair and kept saying: