sighed, and a darker shadow, not from flickering fire, overspread his
cadaverous face. Eighteen years ago he had driven the woman he loved
away from him, out into the world with her baby girl. Never had he
rested beside a camp-fire that that old agony did not recur! Jealous
fool! Too late he had discovered his fatal blunder; and then had begun a
search over Colorado, ending not a hundred miles across the wild
mountains from where he brooded that lonely hour--a search ended by news
of the massacre of a wagon-train by Indians.

That was Bent Wade's secret.

And no earthly sufferings could have been crueler than his agony and
remorse, as through the long years he wandered on and on. The very good
that he tried to do seemed to foment evil. The wisdom that grew out of
his suffering opened pitfalls for his wandering feet. The wildness of
men and the passion of women somehow waited with incredible fatality for
that hour when chance led him into their lives. He had toiled, he had
given, he had fought, he had sacrificed, he had killed, he had endured
for the human nature which in his savage youth he had betrayed. Yet out
of his supreme and endless striving to undo, to make reparation, to give
his life, to find God, had come, it seemed to Wade in his abasement,
only a driving torment.

But though his thought and emotion fluctuated, varying, wandering, his
memory held a fixed and changeless picture of a woman, fair and sweet,
with eyes of nameless blue, and face as white as a flower.

"Baby would have been--let's see--'most nineteen years old now--if she'd
lived," he said. "A big girl, I reckon, like her mother.... Strange how,
as I grow older, I remember better!"

The night wind moaned through the spruces; dark clouds scudded across
the sky, blotting out the bright stars; a steady, low roar of water came
from the outlet of the lake. The camp-fire flickered and burned out, so
that no sparks blew into the blackness, and the red embers glowed and
paled and crackled. Wade at length got up and made ready for bed. He
threw back tarpaulin and blankets, and laid his rifle alongside where he
could cover it. His coat served for a pillow and he put the Colt's gun
under that; then pulling off his boots, he slipped into bed, dressed as
he was, and, like all men in the open, at once fell asleep.

For Wade, and for countless men like him, who for many years had roamed
the West, this sleeping alone in wild places held both charm and peril.