m, where he clenched his fist and looked at it, and longed
for the right to fight his way out.

When smoke began to issue from the cook-house chimney he stirred, rose
and went back. He ate no breakfast, and the men, seeing his squared jaw
and set face, let him alone. He worked with the strength of three men
that day, but that night, when the foreman offered him a job as pacer,
with double wages, he refused it.

"Give it to somebody else, Joe," he said. "I'm quitting."

"The hell you are! When?"

"I'd like to check out to-night."

His going was without comment. They had never fully accepted him, and
comings and goings without notice in the camp were common. He rolled up
his bedding, his change of under-garments inside it, and took the road
that night.

The railroad was ten miles away, and he made the distance easily. He
walked between wire fences, behind which horses moved restlessly as he
passed and cattle slept around a water hole, and as he walked he faced a
situation which all day he had labored like three men to evade.

He was going out of life. It did not much matter whether it was to be
behind bars or to pay the ultimate price. The shadow that lay over him
was that he was leaving forever David and all that he stood for, and a
woman. And the woman was not Elizabeth.

He cursed himself in the dark for a fool and a madman; he cursed the
infatuation which rose like a demoniac possession from his early life.
When that failed he tried to kill it by remembering the passage of time,
the loathing she must have nursed all these years. He summoned the image
of Elizabeth to his aid, to find it eclipsed by something infinitely
more real and vital. Beverly in her dressing-room, grotesque and yet
lovely in her make-up; Beverly on the mountain-trail, in her boyish
riding clothes. Beverly.

Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly
than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often
becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found
himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his
earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of
Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter
jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road
to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of
the impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.

In Spokane he outfitted himself,