"VENGEANCE IS MINE !!"

On some long train ride, Monroe Stahr peered sadly from a closed window.?The outside world seemed suddenly vulgar and vain.?He had lost distinction.?The scenes he saw from the window were common, since He had become common to see them.?Simply, he had become one of them, himself.

Now, in a burst of flame, his Spirit exploded in pieces.?In pain he reached out…to Cathie’s newly laid grave.?It was the only thing she left behind.?Small wonder, he thought grimly; in death it was Cathie who changed him.?

What happened to her? Well, it just happened:?one night she was driving down a dark Mississippi road.?Some Rednecks followed close behind and murdered her.?All else remained the same.?Yet Monroe could not cut off her memory.?Her death consumed him.

When he arrived at her cemetery, he noticed someone else was there, a short plot away.?The other man’s grave site was apparently fresh too, but he saw only the man’s bowed back among the clustered monuments and mortuary yews.

With great heaviness, he walked over and rested his head on Cathie’s gravestone.?What else had he to live for?

His answer came when the other man looked up, wearing an expression that cut Monroe like a knife.?He winced at the sight of the man's pain.

The man withdrew, finally, to slowly advance along the path.?His pace was slow…so that Monroe could see something else on his face he hadn’t noticed before:?a deeply stricken face that looked quite dead.?Yet the man was alive!?That was the point.?What made this man bleed to death, yet live?

Monroe had always been afraid of romantic commitment, always held love back.?This feeling now jostled him; upset him.?Instantly, he grew cold, stupefied at his blindness.?He had presumed it was ‘He’ who was important.?That had been a mistake.?Cathie had seen what he could not.

When he had asked her to wait for love with him in Panther Hollow, the wait itself, was his portion.?He now understood why she had watched him stupidly stare at the only escape she could offer. Monroe’s escape would have been to love her, unconditionally.?Then he would have lived!?

Now, beside her gravestone, he felt he had failed her, miserably.?A low moan rose through his lips, as he remembered the best days of their lives.?

Suddenly, tears froze on his cheeks: racial cruelty sickened him.?Devilish men murdered her. This thought seeped through his Soul. His gray eyes darkened. His lips curled over his teeth, and a growling hiss escaped.

He transformed into a clawing, raging Panther ---- vowing vengeance on devilish men.?He would attack them, tear them limb from limb.?That was the game he would now play.

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