ion!"

"There, there, dear," soothed Agatha. "I am sure everything will come out
all right. But Trevison _does_ look to be the sort of a man who would
abduct a judge, doesn't he? If I were a girl, and felt that he were in
love with me, I'd be mighty careful--"

"That he wouldn't abduct you?" laughed the girl, tremulously, cheered by
the change in her relative's manner.

"No," said Agatha, slyly. "I'd be mighty careful that he _got_ me!"

"Oh!" said the girl, and buried her face in her aunt's shoulder.

CHAPTER XXV

IN THE DARK

Trevison faced the darkness between him and the pueblo with a wild hope
pulsing through his veins. Rosalind Benham had had an opportunity to
deliver him into the hands of his enemy and she had not taken advantage of
it. There was but one interpretation that he might place upon her failure
to aid her accomplice. She declined to take an active part in the scheme.
She had been passive, content to watch while Corrigan did the real work.
Possibly she had no conception of the enormity of the crime. She had been
eager to have Corrigan win, and influenced by her affection and his
arguments she had done what she could without actually committing herself
to the robbery. It was a charitable explanation, and had many flaws, but
he clung to it persistently, nurturing it with his hopes and his hunger
for her, building it up until it became a structure of logic firmly fixed
and impregnable. Women were easily influenced--that had been his
experience with them--he was forced to accept it as a trait of the sex. So
he absolved her, his hunger for her in no way sated at the end.

His thoughts ran to Corrigan in a riot of rage that pained him like a
knife thrust; his lust for vengeance was a savage, bitter-visaged demon
that held him in its clutch and made his temples pound with a yearning to
slay. And that, of course, would have to be the end. For the enmity that
lay between them was not a thing to be settled by the law--it was a man to
man struggle that could be settled in only one way--by the passions,
naked, elemental, eternal. He saw it coming; he leaped to meet it,
eagerly.

Every stride the black horse made shortened by that much the journey he
had resolved upon, and Nigger never ran as he was running now. The black
seemed to feel that he was on the last lap of a race that had lasted for
more than forty-eight hours, with short intervals of rest between, and he
did his best without faltering.