.."

"And you go over the road for life or take a drop at the end of a rope?
And they quit being badmen and buy ranches? That it?"

"That's it. It's a gamble, but...."

"But it's a damned good gamble," laughed Comstock softly. "You ought to
be sheriff, Buck."

But Buck, thinking of how blind to all this he had been so long, how not
even now would he have his eyes open were it not for a girl, longed with
an intense longing for the end of this thing when she might be free to
go from the house of a man like Henry Pollard, when he might be free to
go to her and...

"How does it happen," he asked suddenly, "that you are not after Jimmie
Clayton?"

"When I'm out for a big grizzily," returned Comstock, "I can't waste my
time on little brown bears! That's one thing. Another is that Jimmie
Clayton never had a chance of getting away. If he lives ten days he'll
be nabbed, and he won't live ten days. He's shot to pieces and he's sick
on top of it. I told you last night the poor devil is a fool and a tool
rather than a real badman. If he's got a chance to die quietly, why let
him die outside of jail. It's all one in the end."

Thornton had always felt a sort of pity for Jimmie Clayton; it had
always seemed to him that the poor devil was merely one of the weaker
vessels that go down the stream of life, borne this way and that by the
current that sweeps them on, with little enough chance from the
beginning, having come warped and misshapen from the hands of the
potter. And now Jimmie was about to die. Well, whether it had been
Jimmie Clayton or another who had shot him that night down in Texas, he
would heed the entreaty of the letter and go to him for the last time.

So that night, when darkness came, Thornton left Comstock at the cabin
and rode out towards the mountains, towards the Poison Hole and the
dugout at its side.

It was dark, but not so dark as last night, there being no clouds to
blot out the stars. And the moon was slipping upward through the trees
upon the mountain top when Thornton came at last to the lake. As before,
he was watchful and alert. Clayton was Kid Bedloe's friend, and Clayton
had always struck him as a man in whom one could put little faith. It
was quite in keeping with what he knew that Jimmie's note had been
written at the instigation of Kid Bedloe himself and that he was to be
led out here where Kid Bedloe and Ed might be in waiting for him. It was
quite possible, even probable. But he though