in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret. Some fateful
chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had wrecked.
It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one thing
of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both father
and lover would have found unendurable.

Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death
that put Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be
afraid. It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering
man. All at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's
trouble, or let him stain his hands with blood. He would tell the
truth of Nell's sad story and his own, and make what amends he could.

Then Cameron's thought shifted from father to daughter. She was
somewhere beyond the dim horizon line. In those past lonely hours
by the campfire his fancy had tortured him with pictures of Nell.
But his remorseful and cruel fancy had lied to him. Nell had
struggled upward out of menacing depths. She had reconstructed a
broken life. And now she was fighting for the name and happiness
of her child. Little Nell! Cameron experienced a shuddering ripple
in all his being--the physical rack of an emotion born of a new and
strange consciousness.

As Cameron gazed out over the blood-red, darkening desert suddenly
the strife in his soul ceased. The moment was one of incalculable
change, in which his eyes seemed to pierce the vastness of cloud
and range, and mystery of gloom and shadow--to see with strong vision
the illimitable space before him. He felt the grandeur of the desert,