In that
moment he could lose--McDowell's cleverly trained eyes might detect the
fraud; but to win, if the game was not lost at the first shot, meant an
exciting struggle. Today might be his Armageddon, but it could not
possess the hour of his final triumph.
He felt himself now like a warrior held in leash within sound of the
enemy's guns and the smell of his powder. He held his old world to be
his enemy, for civilization meant people, and the people were the
law--and the law wanted his life. Never had he possessed a deeper
hatred for the old code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
than in this hour when he saw up the valley a gray mist of smoke rising
over the roofs of his home town. He had never conceded within himself
that he was a criminal. He believed that in killing Kirkstone he had
killed a serpent who had deserved to die, and a hundred times he had
told himself that the job would have been much more satisfactory from
the view-point of human sanitation if he had sent the son in the
father's footsteps. He had rid the people of a man not fit to live--and
the people wanted to kill him for it. Therefore the men and women in
that town he had once loved, and still loved, were his enemies, and to
find friends among them again he was compelled to perpetrate a clever
fraud.
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