o do something, and they mostly
want to hurt, same as you've been hurt. Then it gets to the head,
through the blood. That's it; the blood gets hot, and it makes the
brain hot, an' when the brain's hot it thinks hot thoughts, an' they
scorch an' make you feel violent. You think hurt for some one, see?
It's all over the body alike. It's when men get hurt like that that
they want to kill. Gee! You've hurt him."

The boy paused a little breathlessly. His tense nerves were quivering
with some sort of mental strain. It was as though he were watching
something that was going on inside himself, and the effort was
tremendous, physically and mentally. But, used as Eve was to his
vagaries, she saw none of this. She was thinking only of Jim. Thinking
of the suffering which her brother had said she had caused him.
Woman-like, she felt she must excuse herself. Yet she knew she had
nothing to blame herself with.

"I only told him I had promised to marry Will."

The boy uttered a little cry. It was a strange sound, unlike anything
human. He rushed at her, and his thin hands seized upon her wrists,
and clutched them violently.

"You're goin' to marry Will? You! You! And you've hurt him--to marry
Will?" Then, with the force of his clutch upon her wrists, he drew her
down toward him till her face was near to his, and his placid eyes
looked coldly into hers. "You've--hurt--me--too," he hissed into her
face, "and I almost--hate you. No, it's not you--but I hate Will
worse'n I ever hated anything in my life."

CHAPTER V

TO THE RED, DANCING DEVIL

Jim Thorpe dashed the vicious rowels of his Mexican spurs into the
flanks of his horse. Such unaccustomed treatment sent the willing
beast racing headlong across the market-place, while the guiding hand
mechanically directed toward the saloon.

A storm of bitterness wrung the man's heart. A murky pall of
depression hung over his brain, deadening his sense of proportion for
all those things that matter. For the time, at least, it crushed down
in his heart that spirit of striving, which was one of his best
characteristics, and utterly quenched the warm fires of his better
nature. All thought was buried in a fog of wrath, which left him a
prey to instincts utterly foreign to his normal condition. He had left
Eve Marsham's presence in a furious state from which no effort seemed
able to clear him. Nothing gripped his understanding--nothing save the
knowledge of what he had lost, and t