Black Jack, page 39 by Max Brand
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d he was still fighting. About his eyes there was the look, half-dull and half-hard, that comes in the eyes of young people unused to pain. A worried, tense, hungry face. He took her arm and led her to the table. On it lay an article clipped out of a magazine. She looked down at it with unseeing eyes. The sheets were already much crumbled. Terry turned them to a full- page picture, and Elizabeth found herself looking down into the face of Black Jack, proud, handsome, defiant.
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