Vance barely nodded, for his own emotions were so topsy-turvy he dared not risk speaking at that moment.

“I would do it all again,” Vance managed finally to tell him, but in a voice so unlike his own Sidney turned quickly and gave him a look of eloquent wonder. “I would lie for you even, Sid, I reckon. Even if you had killed Brian McFee in cold blood . . .”

“Christ, Vance,” Sidney turned away. He struggled to keep down all the feelings that had threatened to erupt ever since his return.

“I know more than you give me credit for, Sid,” Vance was going on in this new voice, the voice of a stranger, imbued with and full of his new “knowledge.” “I was always pretty sure you thought an awful lot of Brian McFee too.”

Sidney nodded many times, and with each nod he pressed Vance’s knee with his fingers.

“Since you’re getting close, Vance, yes I did . . . I thought an awful lot of him, and he . . . me.” Then almost in fury: “Why do you think we went hunting so much anyhow? . . . But in cold blood,” he quieted down, “no, I never shot him in cold blood. . . . He felt, you see, I was turning against him . . . I wasn’t . . . I was, I mean, trying to gain time to understand my own feelings for him . . . But he couldn’t wait. . . . He felt he’d rather die or see me die than lose my caring for him. . . . So he kept shooting at me in the woods that day. . . . I run to the Bent Ridge Tavern . . . But you know it all, Vance . . . Cold blood, never . . .”

“That’s all you need to say, Sid. . . . You know I believe you.”

“I carry a terrible burden though in my heart, Vance . . . Cold blood, hot blood, whatever you call it . . .”

Sidney buried his face in his hands as he said the last few words. Vance hesitated a long while, then bending over him he pressed his lips to his brother’s neck. It was more like he had whispered a secret to him than bestowed a kiss. Sid took Vance’s hand again in his, and pressed hard again and again.

“There are these people I suppose who are destined to play parts in our lives,” Sidney had said to his brother later that night when Vance had come in to say goodnight to him.

But the thought and the way he pronounced the words were as unlike the old Sidney as it was possible to be.

“You won’t hold it against me now, Vance.” The older brother looked up then, perturbed. “For what I’ve told you tonight, I mean . . .”

Vance shook his head morosely.

“I shouldn’t have told you,” he whispered in the face of Vance’s heavy silence.

“No, no, Sid, you should have,” Vance forced a smile. “It’s my fault, Sid, for what Mama once explained it as my looking up to you too much. Remember?”