Now that he could think of his future, that had no place in his reflections; even the episode of Susy was forgotten in the new and strange conception of himself and his irresponsibility which had come upon him with the killing of Pinckney and the words of his second.

It was his dead father who had stiffened his arm and directed the fatal shot! It was hereditary influences--which others had been so quick to recognize--that had brought about this completing climax of his trouble.

How else could he account for it that he--a conscientious, peaceful, sensitive man, tender and forgiving as he had believed himself to be--could now feel so little sorrow or compunction for his culminating act?
He had read of successful duelists who were haunted by remorse for their first victim; who retained a terrible consciousness of the appearance of the dead man; he had no such feeling; he had only a grim contentment in the wiped-out inefficient life, and contempt for the limp and helpless body.

He suddenly recalled his callousness as a boy when face to face with the victims of the Indian massacre, his sense of fastidious superciliousness in the discovery of the body of Susy's mother!--surely it was the cold blood of his father influencing him ever thus.

What had he to do with affection, with domestic happiness, with the ordinary ambitions of man's life--whose blood was frozen at its source! Yet even with this very thought came once more the old inconsistent tenderness he had as a boy lavished upon the almost unknown and fugitive father who had forsaken his childish companionship, and remembered him only by secret gifts.