Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/298

266 throat, and the words seemed wrenched from his lips as though their weight were a burden too heavy for him longer to bear. "How, Steve? I shot him as he shot Len, my brother, thirty years ago!"

"Then it was Neal that shot Len and—and started the murder among us?" the old sportsman in his turn sought tremblingly for a seat. "For all these years I have known in my heart that it was done by Neal; but, Enoch, you didn't shoot him now because he shot Len—thirty years ago!"

"No, not because he shot Len; but because he made me kill—made me murder old Jim Tyler for it! Now do you understand? Neal shot Len, my brother; and for that, perhaps I should not have shot Neal when, at last, I found it out thirty years later. But for that murder he did himself, he made me murder poor old Jim Tyler, my best friend! So I shot him as he made me shoot Jim Tyler. It was both or none! Neal would be alive to-day, if Jim was!"

"Neal shot Len and made you shoot old Jim Tyler for it?"

"Yes; I shot him, Steve! I shot old Jim—old Jim, who was the truest friend to me of you all! I shot old Jim, whose bed I'd shared—and for these thirty years old Jim has never left me. There are men like that, Steve, who do a thing in haste, and then can't forget. For I'm one of them. I was no kind of a man for a murderer, Steve; I was no man for the business we were in. Len led me—led me where I ought never to have gone, for I hadn't nerve like he and you and Neal had! Then Len was shot, and Neal came to me and told me old Jim had done it. I was