But the bullet went too unerringly; it locked his
lips and fixed his eyes.

After that meeting Duane lay long at the ranchhouse of a friend, and
when he recovered from the wound Sellers had given him he started with
two horses and a pack for the lonely gorge on the Nueces. There he
had been hidden for months, a prey to remorse, a dreamer, a victim of
phantoms.

It took work for him to find subsistence in that rocky fastness. And
work, action, helped to pass the hours. But he could not work all the
time, even if he had found it to do. Then in his idle moments and at
night his task was to live with the hell in his mind.

The sunset and the twilight hour made all the rest bearable. The little
hut on the rim of the gorge seemed to hold Jennie's presence. It was not
as if he felt her spirit. If it had been he would have been sure of her
death. He hoped Jennie had not survived her second misfortune; and that
intense hope had burned into belief, if not surety. Upon his return to
that locality, on the occasion of his first visit to the hut, he had
found things just as they had left them, and a poor, faded piece of
ribbon Jennie had used to tie around her bright hair. No wandering
outlaw or traveler had happened upon the lonely spot, which further
endeared it to Duane.

A strange feature of this memory of Jennie was the freshness of it--the
failure of years, toil, strife, death-dealing to dim it--to deaden
the thought of what might have been. He had a marvelous gift of
visualization. He could shut his eyes and see Jennie before him just as
clearly as if she had stood there in the flesh. For hours he did that,
dreaming, dreaming of life he had never tasted and now never would
taste. He saw Jennie's slender, graceful figure, the old brown ragged
dress in which he had seen her first at Bland's, her little feet in
Mexican sandals, her fine hands coarsened by work, her round arms and
swelling throat, and her pale, sad, beautiful face with its staring dark
eyes. He remembered every look she had given him, every word she had
spoken to him, every time she had touched him. He thought of her beauty
and sweetness, of the few things which had come to mean to him that
she must have loved him; and he trained himself to think of these in
preference to her life at Bland's, the escape with him, and then her
recapture, because such memories led to bitter, fruitless pain. He had
to fight suffering because it was eating out his heart.

Sittin