so much as an eyelash in observance. Two things held him
fascinated. One was the girl who had passed up yonder stairs so wearily
without a single backward glance at him; the other was the silent battle
which went on in the adjoining room. Now and then his imagination
wandered away to secondary pictures. He would see Barry meeting Buck
Daniels, at last, and striking him down as remorselessly as the hound
strikes the hare; or he would see him riding back towards Elkhead and
catch a bright, sad vision of Kate Cumberland waving a careless adieu to
him, and then hear her singing carelessly as she turned away. Such
pictures as these, however, came up but rarely in the mind of Byrne.
Mostly he thought of the stranger leaning over the body of old Joe
Cumberland, reviving him, storing him with electric energy, paying back,
as it were, some ancient debt. And he thought of the girl as she had
turned at the landing place of the stairs, her head fallen; and he
thought of her lying in her bed, with her arm under the mass of bright
hair, trying to sleep, very tired, but remorsely held awake by that same
power which was bringing Joe Cumberland back from the verge of death.

It was all impossible. This thing could not be. It was really as bad as
the yarn of the Frankenstein monster. He considered how it would seem in
print, backed by his most solemn asseverations, and then he saw the
faces of the men who associated with him, pale thoughtful faces striving
to conceal their smiles and their contempt. But always he came back,
like the desperate hare doubling on his course, upon the picture of Kate
Cumberland there at the turning of the stairs, and that bent, bright
head which confessed defeat. The man had forgotten her. It made Byrne
open his eyes in incredulity even to imagine such a thing. The man had
forgotten her! She was no more to him than some withered hag he might
ride past on the road.

His ear, subconsciously attentive to everything around him, caught a
faint sound from the next room. It was a regular noise. It had the
rhythm of a quick footfall, but in its nature it was more like the
sound of a heavily beating pulse. Randall Byrne sat up in his chair. A
faint creaking attested that it was, indeed, a footfall traversing the
room to and fro, steadily.

The stranger, then, no longer leaned over the couch of the old
cattleman. He was walking up and down the floor with that
characteristic, softly padding step. Of what did he think