"Thet war a pity, Bear Cat," he said in a queer voice, though still unangered, wiping his mouth with his bony hand. "I'd thought thet we two--with a common sorrow between us----" There he broke off, and the boy stood for a breathing space, panting and smoldering. He could not come back to cold sanity at one step because he had been too far shaken from his balance--but as he watched the gray-haired man, to whom he had always looked up with veneration and love, standing there, hurt to the quick, and realized that upon that man he had laid violent hands, the crazy fire in his arteries began to cool into an unutterable mortification. Since the cattle trader's story had been told back in the Virginia cabin, until this moment, his mind had been successively scorched with wrath, chilled in despair and buffeted by hurricane violence, but never had it for a tranquil instant been stilled to normality. Over at the Quarterhouse, when in Berserker rage he had been lashing out through a red mist of battle, he had suffered less than since, because in action he was spending the hoarded accumulation of wrath--but since then he had been in the pits of an unbearable hell. Now at the sight of that unresenting figure, wiping the blood from its lip, a new emotion swept him with a flood of chagrin and self-contempt. He had struck down a friend, defenseless and old, who had sought only to give true counsel. The stubborn spirit that had upheld him as he fought his fever-scalded way over the hills, and remained with him as he watched the wedding ceremony, broke; and with face hidden behind spread palms and a body racked by a spasm of collapse, he shook with dry sobs that come in wrenching incoherence from deep in his chest. He reeled and rocked on his feet under the tempest of tearless weeping--and like a blind man staggered back and forth, until the preacher, with a hand on each shoulder, had soothed him, as a child is soothed. At last he found the power of speech. "Fer God's sake, Brother Fulkerson, fergive me ... ef ye kin.... I don't know what I'm doin'.... I'm seein' red." Again his voice vaulted into choleric transports. "Ye says I mustn't call ther Stacys ter bloodshed. Ye're right. Hit's my own private job--an' I'm goin' back thar ter kill him--now! But es fer _you_, I wouldn't hev treated ye with sich disrespect fer no cause in ther world--ef I hadn't been well-nigh crazed." "Son, I forgives ye full free ... but ye jest suspicions these other matters. Ye hain't dead sure--and ye hain't ther man ter go out killin' without ye _air_ plumb sartain.... Now will ye set down an' give me leave ter talk a spell?" The boy dropped upon the edge of the porch and jerked with a palsy of wretchedness, and as he sat the old preacher pleaded.