on."

The herder nodded towards the wagon:

"He's come down with somethin'. Clean off"--he touched his forehead--"I
dassn't leave him."

Bowers immediately went into the wagon, where, after a look at the man
mumbling on the bunk, he said laconically:

"Tick bite."

The brown blotches, flushed forehead, and burning eyes told their own
story.

As Bowers continued to look at the sick man, with his unshaven face and
mop of oily black hair, so long that it was beginning to curl, Dibert
commented:

"He ain't what you'd call pretty--I've no idee he has to keep a rock
handy to stone off the ladies."

But Bowers was searching his mind in the endeavor to recall where he had
seen those curious eyes with the muddy blue-gray iris. It came to him so
suddenly that he shouted it:

"I know him! It's the feller that blowed up my wagon! It's the--that
killed Mary!"

CHAPTER XXII

MULLENDORE WINS

Kate sat on the side bench listening to Mullendore's disjointed
mumblings. It was now well towards midnight and she had been sitting so
for hours in the hope that he might have a lucid moment, but to the
present her vigil had been unrewarded. Mostly his sentences were a
jumble relative to trapping or sheep. Again, he lay inert with his eyes
fixed upon her face in a meaningless stare.

Gusts of wind shook the wagon and swayed the kerosene lamp in its
bracket, while a pounding rain beat a tattoo on the canvas cover. The
tension was telling on Kate and a kind of nervous frenzy grew upon her
as the time dragged by and she was no nearer learning what she had hoped
to learn--than when she had had Mullendore brought to her camp.

She and Bowers had taken turns guarding him, and in growing despair she
had watched him weaken, for each day the chances lessened that his mind
would clear; and now Kate sat staring back into his unblinking eyes
asking herself if it was possible that his crime was to be buried with
him and she must go on the rest of her life bearing the onus of his
guilt? The answer to every question she wanted to know was locked in the
breast of the emaciated man lying on the bunk.

Bowers had proved to be correct in his diagnosis. The headache,
backache, stiff neck and muscles with which Mullendore's illness had
started were the forerunner of brown blotches, fever and jangling
nerves. A virulent case of spotted fever, it was pronounced by "Doc"
Fussel, who doubted that he would recover.

"I'd knock him in the he