doned camp--to die. She became more conscious then of
dull physical agony. But neither fear of death nor thought of pain
occupied her mind. That suddenly awoke to remorse. With the slow ebbing
of her life evil had passed out. If she had been given a choice between
the salvation of her soul and to have Neale with her in her last
moments, to tell him the truth, to beg his forgiveness, to die in his
arms, she would have chosen the latter. Would not some trooper come
before she died, some one to whom she could intrust a message? Some
grave-digger! For the great U. P. R. buried the dead it left in its
bloody tracks!

With strange, numb hands Stanton searched the pockets of her
dressing-gown, to find, at length, a little account-book with pencil
attached. Then, with stiffened fingers, but acute mind, she began to
write to Neale. As she wrote into each word went something of the pang,
the remorse, the sorrow, the love she felt; and when that letter was
ended she laid the little book on her breast and knew for the first time
in many years--peace.

She endured the physical agony; she did not cry out, or complain, or
repent, or pray. Most of the spiritual emotion and life left in her
had gone into the letter. Memory called up only the last moments of her
life--when she saw Ancliffe die; when she folded innocent Allie Lee
to the breast that had always yearned for a child; when Neale in his
monstrous stupidity had misunderstood her; when he had struck her before
the grinning crowd, and in burning words branded her with the one
name unpardonable to her class; when at the climax of a morbid and
all-consuming hate, a hate of the ruined woman whose body and mind had
absorbed the vile dregs, the dark fire and poison, of lustful men, she
had inhumanly given Allie Lee to the man she had believed the wildest,
most depraved, and most dangerous brute in all Benton; when this Larry
King, by some strange fatality, becoming as great as he was wild, had
stalked out to meet her like some red and terrible death.

She remembered now that strange, icy gloom and shudder she had always
felt in the presence of the cowboy. Within her vitals now was the same
cold, deadly, sickening sensation, and it was death. Always she had
anticipated it, but vaguely, unrealizingly.

Larry King had lifted the burden of her life. She would have been
glad--if only Neale had understood her! That was her last wavering
conscious thought.

Now she drifted from human co