. I am going to realize
that capital. I am going to leave this house--I am going to leave it
forever. I shall change my name, and cover up my tracks, for I intend
going where I am not known. I am going where men cannot figure in my
life, which I intend to begin all over again. The burden Fate has
imposed upon me is too great. I am going to run from it."

She laughed. And her laugh was as mirthless as her aunt's had been.

CHAPTER IV

TWO MEN OF THE WILDERNESS

The westering sun was drooping heavily toward its fiery couch. The
purple of evening was deepening from the east, meeting and blending
softly with the gold of the dying day. A great furnace of ruddy cloud
rose above the mountain-tops, lighting the eternal snows of the peaks
and ancient glaciers with a wealth of kaleidoscopic color. Viewed from
the plains below there might have been a great fire raging among the
hill-caps, where only snow and ice could provide the fuel.

The radiant colors of sunset held the quiet eyes of a solitary
horseman riding amidst the broken lands of the lesser foot-hills. He
was a big man, of powerful shoulders and stout limbs. He was a man of
fifty or thereabouts, yet his hair was snow white, a perfect mane that
reached low upon his neck, touching the soft collar of his cotton
shirt. His face was calm with something of the peace of the world
through which he was riding, something of the peace which comes to
those who have abandoned forever the strife of the busy life beyond.
It only needed the garb of the priest, and his appearance would have
matched perfectly his sobriquet, "the Padre."

But Moreton Kenyon was clad in the rough moleskin, the riding boots
and general make-up of the western life to which he belonged. Even he
carried the protecting firearms by which to administer the personal
laws of the wilderness. His whole appearance, the very horse under
him, a prairie-bred broncho of excellent blood, suggested a man who
knew the life amidst which he lived, and was more than capable of
surviving it.

Whatever his appearance, whatever his capacity for the rougher corners
of earth, Moreton Kenyon was a man of great kindliness, of great
sympathy, as the mission from which he was now returning might well
have testified. Those who knew him best held him in deep affection.
Those who knew him less withheld their judgment, but never failed to
treat him with a courtesy not usual amongst the derelicts of an
out-world camp.

Jus