I'm waitin'!"
"Keep up those hands!"
"I won't!" He lowered them defiantly. "I w-wanted to m-make
Partridgeville and see the old lady. She'd 'a' helped me. But
anything's better'n goin' back to that hell where I been the last
two years. Go on! Why don't you shoot?"
"You wanted to make Partridgeville and see--_who_?"
"My mother--and my wife."
"Have you got a mother? Have you got a--wife?"
"Yes, and three kids. Why don't you shoot?"
It seemed an eon that they stood so. The McBride woman was trying to
find the nerve to fire. She could not. In that instant she made a
discovery that many luckless souls make too late: _to kill a man_ is
easy to talk about, easy to write about. But to stand deliberately
face to face with a fellow-human--alive, pulsing, breathing, fearing,
hoping, loving, living,--point a weapon at him that would take his
life, blot him from the earth, negate twenty or thirty years of
childhood, youth, maturity, and make of him in an instant--nothing!
--that is quite another matter.
He was helpless before her now. Perhaps the expression on his face
had something to do with the sudden revulsion that halted her finger.
Facing certain death, some of the evil in those crooked eyes seemed
to die out, and the terrible personality of the man to fade.
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