his reasoning went round and round in a circle, until he was
utterly heartsick with no hope of finding peace.

There was one thing he could do: it would be tightening the screws of his
torture, but he meant to do it for her sake. He would take her to Fort
Bliss himself, shielding her from publicity and humiliation; and he would
take charge of Vic, and see that the kid did not suffer too much on
account of his sister.

He would make a man of Vic; he never guessed that he was taking up
mentally the burden which Peter had laid upon Helen May. He believed
there was good stuff in that kid, and with the right handling he would
come out all right. He would put in a plea to his chief for leniency
toward the girl too. He would say that she was young and inexperienced
and that Holman Sommers had probably drawn her into his scheme--Starr
could see how that might easily be--and that her health was absolutely
dependent upon open air. They couldn't keep her shut up long; a girl
could not do much harm, if the rest of the bunch was convicted. Maybe
the lesson and the scare would be all she needed to pull her back into
lawful living. She was not a hardened adventuress; why, she couldn't be
much over twenty-one or two! After a while, when she had straightened
up, maybe ...

So Starr thought and thought, fighting to keep a little hope alive, to
see a little gleam of light in the blackness of his soul. His head bent,
his eyes staring unseeingly at the yellow-brown dust of the trail, he
rode along unconscious of everything save the battle raging fiercely
within. He did not know what pace Rabbit was taking; he even forgot that
he was on Rabbit's back. He did not know that his duty as a man and his
man's love were fighting the fiercest battle of his life, or if he did,
he never thought to call it a battle.

There had been one black night in the cabin--the night before this last
one, it was--when he had considered for a while how he might smuggle
Helen May out of the country, suppressing the fact of her complicity. He
planned just how he could put her on a train and "shoot her to Los
Angeles," as he worded it to himself. How she could take a boat there for
Vancouver, and how he could hold back developments here until he knew she
was safe. He figured the approximate cost and the hole it would make in
his little savings account. He thought of everything, even to marrying
her before she left, so that he could not be compelled to testify again