oken cat-naps full of fearful dreams, from which he woke
in terror under the impression that he was struggling helplessly in the
net of a great spider which had the cruel, bloodless face of Tighe. It
was three o'clock when he rose and began to dress. He slipped out of
the cabin into the wet pasture. His legs were sopping wet from the
long grass through which he strode to the edge of the gulch. On a flat
boulder he sat shivering in the darkness while he waited for the first
gray streaks of light to sift into the dun sky.

In the dim dawn he stumbled uncertainly down the trail into the canon,
the bottom of which was still black as night from a heavy growth of
young aspens that shut out the light. There was a fairly well-worn
path leading up the gulch, so that he could grope his way forward
slowly. His feet moved reluctantly. It seemed to him that his nerves,
his brain, and even his muscles were in revolt against the moral
compulsion that drove him on. He could feel his heart beating against
his ribs. Every sound startled him. The still darkness took him by
the throat. Doggedly he fought against the panic impulse to turn and
fly.

If he quit now, he told himself, he could never hold his self-respect.
He thought of all those who had come into his life in connection with
the Big Creek country trouble. His father, his mother, Dave Dingwell,
Pat Ryan, Jess Tighe, the whole Rutherford clan, including Beulah! One
quality they all had in common, the gameness to see out to a finish
anything they undertook. He could not go through life a confessed
coward. The idea was intolerably humiliating.

Then, out of the past, came to him a snatch of nonsense verse:--

"Li'l' ole hawss an' li'l' ole cow,
Amblin' along by the ole haymow,
Li'l' ole hawss took a bite an' a chew,
'Durned if I don't,' says the ole cow, too."

So vivid was his impression of the doggerel that for an instant he
thought he heard the sing-song of his father's tuneless voice. In
sharp, clean-cut pictures his memory reproduced the night John Beaudry
had last chanted the lullaby and that other picture of the Homeric
fight of one man against a dozen. The foolish words were a bracer to
him. He set his teeth and ploughed forward, still with a quaking soul,
but with a kind of despairing resolution.

After a mile of stiff going, the gulch opened to a little valley on the
right-hand side. On the edge of a pine grove, hardly a stone's throw
fro