“My God! You killed McKue by sheer strength--with your bare hands!... I had not looked at your hands. I see them now.... So McKue was your enemy?” “No. I never saw him before that day,” replied Adam. Virey slowly drew back wonderingly, yet with instinctive shrinking. Certain it was that his lips stiffened. “Then why did you kill him?” “He ill-treated a woman.” Adam turned away as he replied. He did not choose then to show in his eyes the leaping thought that had been born of the memory and of Virey’s strange reaction. But he heard him draw a quick, sharp breath and step back. Then a silence ensued. Adam gazed up at the endless slope, at the millions of rocks, all apparently resting lightly in their pockets, ready to plunge down. “So--so that was it,” spoke up Virey, evidently with effort. “I always wondered. Wild West sort of story, you know. Strange I should meet you.... Thanks for telling me. I gather it wasn’t pleasant for you.” “It’s sickening to recall, but I have no regrets,” replied Adam. “Quite so. I understand. Man of the desert--ruthless--inhuman sort of thing.” “Inhuman?” queried Adam, and he looked at Virey, at last stung. Behind Virey’s pale, working face and averted eyes Adam read a conscience in tumult, a spirit for the moment terrorized. “Virey, you and I’d never agree on meanings of words.... I broke McKue’s arms and ribs and legs, and while I cracked them I told him what an inhuman dastard he had been--to ruin a girl, to beat her, to abandon her and her baby--to leave them to die. I told him how I had watched them die ... then I broke his neck!... McKue was the inhuman man--not I.” Virey turned away, swaying a little, and his white hand, like a woman’s, sought the stone wall for support, until he reached the shack, which he entered. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Virey, that story had to come up,” said Adam, confronting her with reluctance. But she surprised him again. He expected to find her sickened, shrinking from him as a bloody monster, perhaps half fainting; he found, however, that she seemed serene, controlling deep emotions which manifested themselves only in the marble whiteness of her cheek, the strained darkness of her eye.