yellow-wheeled
buckboard, shattered and twisted round a telegraph pole. The lights
moved up slowly and stopped again.

A man jumped from the machine and walked round the buckboard. Beneath it
lay a crumpled figure. The driver of the machine ran a quick hand over
the neck and arms of Waco, who groaned. The driver lifted him and
carried him to the car. Stacey lay some twenty miles behind him. He was
bound south. The first town on his way was thirty miles distant. But the
roads were good. He glanced back at the huddled figure in the tonneau.
The car purred on down the night. The long shafts of light lifted over a
rise and disappeared.

In about an hour the car stopped at the town of Grant. Waco was carried
from the machine to a room in the hotel, and a doctor was summoned.
Waco lay unconscious throughout the night.

In the morning he was questioned briefly. He gave a fictitious name, and
mentioned a town he had heard of, but had never been in. His horses had
run away with him.

The man who had picked him up drove away next morning. Later the doctor
told Waco that through a miracle there were no bones broken, but that he
would have to keep to his bed for at least a week. Otherwise he would
never recover from the severe shock to his nervous system.

And Waco, recalling the horror of the preceding day, twisted his head
round at every footstep in the hall, fearing that Waring had come to
question him. He knew that he had done no wrong; in fact, he had told
Pat that they had better drive back home. But a sense of shame at his
cowardice, and the realization that his word was as water in evidence,
that he was but a wastrel, a tramp, burdened him with an aching desire
to get away--to hide himself from Waring's eyes, from the eyes of all
men.

He kept telling himself that he had done nothing wrong, yet fear shook
him until his teeth chattered. What could he have done even had he been
courageous? Pat had had no chance.

He suffered with the misery of indecision. Habit inclined him to flee
from the scene of the murder. Fear of the law urged him. Three nights
after he had been brought to Grant, he dressed and crept down the back
stairs, and made his way to the railroad station. Twice he had heard the
midnight freight stop and cut out cars on the siding. He hid in the
shadows until the freight arrived. He climbed to an empty box-car and
waited. Trainmen crunched past on the cinders. A jolt and he was swept
away toward the west