y crucible.
In all the years that had gone he had had an ungovernable desire to kill
both Bignold and Marcile if he ever met them--a primitive, savage desire
to blot them out of life and being. His fingers had ached for Marcile's
neck, that neck in which he had lain his face so often in the transient,
unforgettable days of their happiness. If she was alive now!--if she was
still alive!

Her story was hidden there in Keeley's Gulch with Bignold, and he was
galloping hard to reach his foe. As he went, by some strange alchemy of
human experience, by that new birth of his brain, the world seemed
different from what it had ever been before, at least since the day when
he had found an empty home and a shamed hearthstone. He got a new feeling
toward it, and life appealed to him as a thing that might have been so
well worth living! But since that was not to be, then he would see what he
could do to get compensation for all that he had lost, to take toll for
the thing that had spoiled him, and given him a savage nature and a raging
temper, which had driven him at last to kill a man who, in no real sense,
had injured him.

Mile after mile they journeyed, a troop of interested people coming after;
the sun and the clear, sweet air, the waving grass, the occasional
clearings where settlers had driven in the tent-pegs of home; the forest
now and then swallowing them, the mountains rising above them like a blank
wall, and then suddenly opening out before them; and the rustle and
scamper of squirrels and coyotes; and over their heads the whistle of
birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl. The tender sap of youth
was in this glowing and alert new world, and, by sudden contrast with the
prison walls which he had just left behind, the earth seemed recreated,
unfamiliar, compelling, and companionable. Strange that in all the years
that had been since he had gone back to his abandoned home to find Marcile
gone, the world had had no beauty, no lure for him. In the splendor of it
all he had only raged and stormed, hating his fellow-man, waiting, however
hopelessly, for the day when he should see Marcile and the man who had
taken her from him. And yet now, under the degradation of his crime and
its penalty, and the unmanning influence of being the helpless victim of
the iron power of the law, rigid, ugly, and demoralizing--now with the
solution of his life's great problem here before him in the hills, with
the man for whom he had wai