Had Vance been there, he might have recognized her actions. As she had done one day twenty-four years ago, now she turned and dropped heavily into a chair, her bony hands pressed to her shallow bosom. A moment later she was on her feet again, ready to fight, ready to tell a thousand lies. But it was too late. The revelation had been complete and she could tell by his face that Terence knew everything.
“Terry,” she said faintly, “what on earth have you to do with that—”
“Listen, Aunt Elizabeth,” he said, “you aren't going to fib about it, are you?”
“What in the world are you talking about?”
“Why were you so shocked?”
She knew it was a futile battle. He was prying at her inner mind with short questions and a hard, dry voice.
“It was the face of that terrible man. I saw him once before, you know. On the day—”
“On the day he was murdered!”
That word told her everything. “Murdered!” It lighted all the mental processes through which he had been going. Who in all the reaches of the mountain desert had ever before dreamed of terming the killing of the notorious Black Jack a “murder”?
“What are you saying, Terence? That fellow—”
“Hush! Look at us!”
He picked up the photograph and stood back so that the light fell sharply on his face and on the photograph which he held beside his head. He caught up a sombrero and jammed it jauntily on his head. He tilted his face high, with resolute chin. And all at once there were two Black Jacks, not one. He evidently saw all the admission that he cared for in her face. He took off the hat with a dragging motion and replaced the photograph on the table.
“I tried it in the mirror,” he said quietly. “I wasn't quite sure until I tried it in the mirror. Then I knew, of course.”
She felt him slipping out of her life.
“What shall I say to you, Terence?”
“Is that my real name?”
She winced. “Yes. Your real name.”
“Good. Do you remember our talk of today?”
“What talk?”
He drew his breath with something of a groan.
“I said that what these people lacked was the influence of family—of old blood!”
He made himself smile at her, and Elizabeth trembled. “If I could explain—” she began.
“Ah, what is there to explain, Aunt Elizabeth? Except that you have been a thousand times kinder to me than I dreamed before. Why, I—I actually thought that you were rather honored by having a Colby under your roof. I really felt that I was bestowing something of a favor on you!”
“Terry, sit down!”
He sank into a chair slowly. And she sat on the arm of it with her mournful eyes on his face.
“Whatever your name may be, that doesn't change the man who wears the name.”
He laughed softly. “And you've been teaching me steadily for twenty-four years that blood will tell? You can't change like this. Oh, I understand it perfectly. You determined to make me over. You determined to destroy my heritage and put the name of the fine old Colbys in its place. It was a brave thing to try, and all these years how you must have waited, and waited to see how I would turn out, dreading every day some outbreak of the bad blood! Ah, you have a nerve of steel, Aunt Elizabeth! How have you endured the suspense?”
She felt that he was mocking her subtly under this flow of compliment. But it was the bitterness of pain, not of reproach, she knew.
She said: “Why didn't you let me come up with you? Why didn't you send for me?”
“I've been busy doing a thing that no one could help me with. I've been burning my dreams.” He pointed to a smoldering heap of ashes on the hearth.
“Terry!”
“Yes, all the Colby pictures that I've been collecting for the past fifteen years. I burned 'em. They don't mean anything to anyone else, and certainly they have ceased to mean anything to me. But when I came to Anthony Colby—the eighteen-twelve man, you know, the one who has always been my hero—it went pretty hard. I felt as if—I were burning my own personality. As a matter of fact, in the last couple of hours I've been born over again.”
Terry paused. “And births are painful, Aunt Elizabeth!”
At that she cried out and caught his hand. “Terry dear! Terry dear! You break my heart!”
“I don't mean to. You mustn't think that I'm pitying myself. But I want to know the real name of my father. He must have had some name other than Black Jack. What was it?”
“Are you going to gather his memory to your heart, Terry?”
“I am going to find something about him that I can be proud of. Blood will tell. I know that I'm not all bad, and there must have been good in Black Jack. I want to know all about him. I want to know about—his crimes.”
