f-recrimination ceased, and the chaos of emotion
within his brain shaped and crystallized into a single overmastering
purpose. He would find Purdy. He would kill him. Nothing else mattered.
A day--a year--ten years--it did not matter. He would find Purdy and
kill him. He would not kill him quickly. Purdy must have time to
think--plenty of time to think. The man even smiled grimly as he devised
and discarded various plans. "They're all too easy--too gentle. I'll
leave it to Old Bat--he's Injun--he'll know. An' if Bat was here he'd
pick up the trail." A wild idea of crossing the river and fetching Bat
flashed into his mind, but he banished it. "Bat'll come," he muttered,
with conviction. "He's found out before this that I've gone an' he'll
come."

As the sun sank below the horizon, the Texan turned his horse toward
McWhorter's. He paused on a rocky spur for one last look over the bad
lands, and raising his gauntleted fist, he shook it in the face of the
solitude: "I'll get you! Damn you! _Damn you!_"

As he whirled his horse and headed him out into the open bench, a squat,
bow-legged man peered out from behind a rock, not fifty feet from where
the Texan had sat his horse. A tuft of hair protruded from a hole in the
crown of his battered hat as he fingered his stubby beard: "Pretty damn
lively for a corpse," grinned the squat man, "an' he _will_ git him,
too. An' if that there gal wasn't safe at Cinnabar Joe's, I'd see that
he got him tonight. It looks from here as if God A'mighty's gittin'
ready to call Purdy's bluff."

CHAPTER XIX

AT MCWHORTER'S RANCH

Colin McWhorter was a man of long silences. A big framed, black-bearded
giant of a man, he commanded the respect of all who knew him, and the
friendship of few. His ranch, his sheep, his daughter were things that
concerned him--the rest of the world was for others. Twice each year, on
the twentieth of June and the third of December, he locked himself in
his room and drank himself very drunk. At all other times he was very
sober. No one, not even Janet, knew the significance of those dates. All
the girl knew was that with deadly certainty when the day arrived her
father would be locked in his room, and that on the third day thereafter
he would unlock the door and come out of the room, shaken in nerve and
body, dispose of an armful of empty bottles, resume his daily routine,
and never by word or look would he refer to the matter.

These semi-annual sprees had