He wore his belt with the holsters and the revolver-butts showed from those same holsters. I was astonished at this. When I saw it on him the day before I had thought the belt a piece of bad taste. It might have been advisable in portions of his long ride, might have been imperatively necessary in some districts; but it seemed a pose or a stupidity to wear it so far east. Pistols were by no means unknown in our part of the world, but they were carried in the seclusion of the hip-pocket or inside the breast of one’s coat, not flaunted in the face of the populace in low-hung pig-skin holsters. Case greeted me cheerily. “I got up too early,” he stated. “I’ve had my breakfast and done my target practice twice over. Apparently you expect me to go with you in that buggy?” I told him that I did. “Come in and sit down a moment,” he said in a somewhat embarrassed way. “This suggestion of our driving together is in line with your kind invitation for last night. I see I must explain somehow.” He offered me a cigar and though I seldom smoke in the morning, I took it, for, I thought smoking would fill up the silences I anticipated. He puffed a while, in fact. “Have you ever been among feudists in the mountains?” he queried. “More than a little,” I told him. “Likely enough then,” he went on, “you know more about their ways than I do. But I saw something of them myself, before I left America. Did you ever notice how a man at either focus of a feud, the king-pin of his end of it so to speak, manifests the greatest care to avoid permitting others to expose themselves to any degree of the danger always menacing him; how such men, in the black shadow of doom, as it were, are solicitous to prevent outsiders from straying into the penumbra of the eclipse which threatens themselves?” “I have observed that,” I replied. “Have you noticed on the other hand,” he continued, “that they never show any concern for acquaintances who comprehend the situation, but pay them the compliment of assuming that they have sense enough to know what they are doing and to take care of themselves?” “I have observed that same too,” I affirmed. He puffed again for a while. “My father,” he returned presently, “used to say that there are two ends to a quarrel, the right end and the wrong end, but that either end of a feud is the wrong end. I am one end of a feud. Wherever I am is one focus of that feud. The other focus is local, and I have removed myself as far as may be from it. But I am not safe here, should not be safe anywhere on earth; doubt if I should be safe on the moon, or Mars, on a planet of some other sun, or the least conspicuous satellite of the farthest star. I am obnoxious to the hate of a power as far-reaching” ... he took off his broad felt hat and looked up at the canvas of the tent-roof ... “as far-reaching as the displeasure of God.” “And as implacable,” he almost whispered. “As the malice of Satan.” He looked sane, healthy and self-possessed.