Pale
Face Harry boarded, and this was Pale Face Harry--but--

"Doc," said Pale Face Harry, and he shuffled his feet and looked down,
"Doc, I got something I've been wanting to say to you for a week."

Madison still gazed at him apathetically--Pale Face Harry for the moment
was as some unwarrantable apparition suddenly appearing before him.

Pale Face Harry raised his eyes, lowered them, kicked at a clod of earth
with the toe of his boot--and raised his eyes again.

"Say," he blurted out, "I'm through, Doc. I'm--I'm going to quit."

Into Madison's stumbling brain leaped and took form but one idea--and he
jumped forward, reaching savagely for Pale Face Harry's throat.

"You'd throw me, would you! You'd throw the game--would you!" he
snarled, as his fingers locked.

Pale Face Harry, twisting, wriggled free--and retreated a step.

"No; I ain't!" he gasped--and then his sentences came tumbling out upon
each other jerkily, as though he were trying to compress what he had to
say into as few words as possible and as quickly as he could, while he
watched Madison warily. "I ain't throwing nothing. I just want to quit
myself. I keeps my mouth shut--see? I don't want none of the share
what's coming. Say, I've got more'n a hundred times that out of it. Look
at me, Doc! Say, I'm like a horse. That's the Patriarch and living
honest. Say, in all me life I never knew what it was before till we
comes here. If I took the dough what's coming I'd go back to the old
hell, and I'd go down and out again. Say, it ain't worth it, there's
nothing in it. I ain't throwing you, Doc--I just blows out of here with
me trap closed. Say, look at me, Doc--don't you get what I mean?"

And then Madison burst into a peal of wild, strange laughter; and, as
though no man stood before him, started on along the path--and Pale Face
Harry sidled out of his way and stared after him.

"For--for God's sake, Doc," he called out, stammering, "what's the
matter?"

But Madison made no answer. He heard Pale Face Harry call out behind
him; in a subconscious, mazed way, he sensed the other following him,
gropingly, hesitantly, for a few yards, then hold back--and finally
stop.

The path swerved. Madison went on--blindly, mechanically, as though,
once set in motion, he must go on. Some ghastly, unnatural thing was
clogging his brain; not only in a mental way, but clogging it until
there was physical hurt and pain, an awful tightness--something--if he
could only