the crest of the grade. Only
for a post that he might snub that stubborn strand of leather upon! only
for a bridge where his swinging weight might break it!

Faster--the train was going faster! The pain of his torture dulling as
overcharged nerves refused to carry the growing load, Morgan still clung
to his feet, pounding along in the dark. He was growing numb in body and
mind, as one overwhelmed by a narcotic drug, yet he clung to the
desperate necessity of keeping on his feet.

How far he had come, how long he might yet endure, he had no thought to
measure. He lived only for the insistent, tenacious purpose of keeping
on his feet, rather than of keeping on his feet to live. He must run and
pant, under the lash of nature that would not let him drop down and die,
as long as a spark of consciousness remained or flying limbs could equal
the speed of the train, helped on by the drag of that rawhide strand
that would not break.

No thought of death appalled him now as at first; its revolting terror
at that rope's end had no place in his thought this crowded, surging
moment. Only to live, to fight and live, to run, unfeeling feet striking
like wood upon the wayside stones, and run, as a maimed, scorched
creature before a fire, to fall into some cool place and live. And live!
and live! In spite of all, to live!

And presently the ground fell away beneath his feet, a swish of branches
was about him, the soft, cool touch of leaves against his face. A moment
he was flung and tangled among willows--it was a strange revelation
through a chink of consciousness in that turmoil of life and death that
swept the identifying scent of willows into his nostrils--and then he
dropped, striking softly where water ran, and closed his eyes, thinking
it must be the end.

CHAPTER VIII

THE AVATISM OF A MAN

Morgan knew that the cogs of the slow machinery by which he had been
hoisted from the saddle to the professorial chair had slipped. As he lay
there on his back in the shallow ripple of the Arkansas River, the long
centipede railroad bridge dark-lined across the broad stream, he turned
it in his mind and knew that it was so.

He had gone back in that brief time of terrific torture to the plane
from which he had risen by hard and determined effort to make of himself
a man in the world of consequence and achievement; back to the savagery
of the old days when he rode the range in summer glare and winter storm.
For it was his li