The stranger observed his host's agitation, but put away his pipe with slow and steady hand. He said nothing, and yet an observer would have declared he held the other and weaker man in the grasp of an inexorable hypnotic silence. Finally he fixed a calm, cold glance upon his host, as if summoning him to answer.
"Yes," the miner confessed, "there is always a woman in the case – another and more fortunate man. The woman is false, the man is treacherous. You trust and they betray. Such beings ruin and madden – they make outlaws such as I am – "
"Love is above will," asserted the millwright, with decision.
The other man fiercely turned. "I know what you mean – you mean the woman is not to be condemned – that love goes where it is drawn. That is true, but deceit is not involuntary – it is deliberate – "
"Sometimes we deceive ourselves."
"In her case it was deceit," retorted the miner, who was now so deeply engaged with his own story that each general observation on the part of his guest was taken to be specific and personal.
The room was growing dusky, and the stranger's glance appeared keener, more insistent, as his body melted into the shadow. His shaggy head and black beard all but disappeared; only the faint outlines of his forehead remained, and yet, as his physical self faded into the gloom, his personality, his psychic self, loomed larger. His will enveloped the hermit, drawing upon him with irresistible power. It was as if he were wringing him dry of a confession as the priest closes in upon the culprit.
"I had my happy days – my days of care-free youth," the unquiet man was saying. "But my time of innocence was short. Evil companions came early and reckless deeds followed… I knew I was losing something, I knew I was being drawn downward, but I could not escape. Day and night I called for help, and then —she came – "
"Who came?"
"The one who made me forget all the others, the one who made me ashamed."
"And then?"
"And then for a time I was happy in the hope that I might win her and so redeem my life."
"And she?"
"She pitied me – at first – and loved me – at least I thought so."
As his excitement increased his words came slower, burdened with passion. He spoke like a prisoner addressing a judge, his voice but a husky whisper.
"I told her I was unworthy of her – that was when I believed her to be an angel. I promised to begin a new life for her sake. Then she promised me – helped me – and all the while she was false to me – false as a hell-cat!"
"How?" queried the almost invisible man, and his voice was charged with stern demand.
"All the time she was promised to another man – and that man my enemy."
Here his frenzy flared forth in a torrent of words.
"Then – then I went mad. My brain was scarred and numb. I lost all sense of pity – all fear of law – all respect for woman. I only knew my wrongs – my despair – my hate. I watched, I waited, I found them together – "
"And then? What did you do then?" demanded the stranger, rising from his seat with sudden energy, his voice deep, insistent, masterful. "Tell me what you did?"
The miner's wild voice died to a hesitant whisper. "I – I fled."
"But before that – before you fled?"
"What is it to you?" asked the hermit, gazing with scared eyes at the man who towered above him like the demon of retribution. "Who are you?"
"I am the avenger!" answered the other. "The man you hated was my brother. The woman you killed was his wife."
The fugitive fell upon his knees with a cry like that of one being strangled.
Out of the darkness a red flame darted, and the crouching man fell to the floor, a crumpled, bloody heap.
For a long time the executioner stood above the body, waiting, listening from the shadow to the faint receding breath-strokes of his victim. When all was still he restored his weapon to its sheath and stepped over the threshold into the keen and pleasant night.
As he closed the door behind him the stranger raised his eyes to Solidor, whose sovereign, cloud-like crest swayed among the stars.
"Now I shall rest," he said, with solemn satisfaction.
THE TRAIL TRAMP
– mounted wanderer, horseman of the restless heart, still rides from place to place, contemptuous of gold, carrying in his parfleche all the vanishing traditions of the West.
V
THE TRAIL TRAMP
Kelley was in off the range and in profound disgust with himself, for after serving honorably as line-rider and later as cow-boss for ten years or more, he had ridden over to Keno to meet an old comrade. Just how it happened he couldn't tell, but he woke one morning without a dollar and, what was worse, incredibly worse, without horse or saddle! Even his revolver was gone.
In brief, Tall Ed, for the first time in his life, was set afoot, and this, you must understand, is a most direful disaster in cowboy life. It means that you must begin again from the ground up, as if you were a perfectly new tenderfoot from Nebraska.
Fort Keno was, of course, not a real fort; but it was a real barracks. The town was an imitation town. The fort, spick, span, in rows, with nicely planted trees and green grass-plats (kept in condition at vast expense to the War Department), stood on the bank of the sluggish river, while just below it and across the stream sprawled the town, drab, flea-bitten, unkempt, littered with tin cans and old bottles, a collection of saloons, gambling-houses and nameless dives, with a few people – a very few – making an honest living by selling groceries, saddles, and coal-oil.
Among the industries of Keno City was a livery-and-sales stable, and Kelley, with intent to punish himself, at once applied for the position of hostler. "You durned fool," he said, addressing himself, "as you've played the drunken Injun, suppose you play valet to a lot of mustangs for a while."
As a disciplinary design he felicitated himself as having hit upon the most humiliating and distasteful position in Keno. It was understood that Harford of the Cottonwood Corral never hired a real man as hostler. He seemed to prefer bums and tramps, either because he could get them cheaper or else because no decent man would work for him. He was an "arbitrary cuss" and ready with gun or boot. He came down a long trail of weather-worn experiences in the Southwest, and showed it in both face and voice. He was a big man who had once been fatter, but his wrinkled and sour visage seldom crinkled into a smile. He had never been jolly, and he was now morose.
Kelley hated him. That, too, was another part of his elaborate scheme of self-punishment – hated, but did not fear him, for Tall Ed Kelley feared nothing that walked the earth or sailed the air. "You bum," he continued to say in bitter derision as he caught glimpses of himself of a morning in the little fragment of broken glass which, being tacked on the wall, served as mirror in the office. "You durned mangy coyote, you need a shave, but you won't get it. You need a clean shirt and a new bandanna, but you won't get them, neither – not yet awhile. You'll earn 'em by going without a drop of whisky and by forking manure fer the next six months. You hear me?"
He slept in the barn on a soiled, ill-smelling bunk, and his hours of repose were broken by calls on the telephone or by some one beating at the door late at night or early in the morning; but he always responded without a word of complaint. It was all lovely discipline. It was like batting a measly bronco over the head in correction of some grievous fault (like nipping your calf, for example), and he took a grim satisfaction in going about degraded and forgotten of his fellows, for no one in Keno knew that this grimy hostler was cow-boss on the Perco. This, in a certain degree, softened his disgrace and lessened his punishment, but he couldn't quite bring himself to the task of explaining just how he had come to leave the range and go into