To be sure, he had
been only a boy at that time, but he had been a man since, and the cold
light of reason should have shown him that there must have been cause
for his father's brutal treatment of him--if indeed it had been brutal.
In fact, if he had acted in his youth as he had acted since reaching
maturity, there was small reason to wonder that he had received blows.
Boys needed to be reprimanded, punished, and perhaps he had deserved
all he had received.
The tone of his father's letters was distinctly sorrowful. Remorse,
sincere remorse, had afflicted him. His father had been wronged,
misled, betrayed, and humiliated by the Taggarts, and as Calumet stood
beside the corral fence he found that all his rage--the bitter,
malignant hatred which had once been in his heart against his
father--had vanished, that it had been succeeded by an emotion that was
new to him--pity. An hour, two hours, passed before he turned and
walked toward the ranchhouse. His lips were grim and white, tell-tale
signs of a new resolve, as he stepped softly upon the rear porch,
stealthily opened the kitchen door, and let himself in. He halted at
the table on which stood the kerosene lamp, looking at the chair in
which he had been sitting some hours before talking to Betty, blinking
at the chair in which she had sat, summoning into his mind the picture
she had made when he had voiced his suspicions about her knowledge of
the contents of the letter she had given him.
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