a primitive, savage desire to blot them out of life and being. His
fingers had ached for Marcile's neck, that neck in which he had lain his
face so often in the transient, unforgettable days of their happiness.
If she was alive now--if she was still alive! Her story was hidden there
in Keeley's Gulch with Bignold, and he was galloping hard to reach his
foe. As he went, by some strange alchemy of human experience, by that
new birth of his brain, the world seemed different from what it had ever
been before, at least since the day when he had found an empty home and a
shamed hearthstone. He got a new feeling toward it, and life appealed to
him as a thing that might have been so well worth living. But since that
was not to be, then he would see what he could do to get compensation for
all that he had lost, to take toll for the thing that had spoiled him,
and given him a savage nature and a raging temper, which had driven him
at last to kill a man who, in no real sense, had injured him.

Mile after mile they journeyed, a troop of interested people coming
after, the sun and the clear sweet air, the waving grass, the occasional
clearings where settlers had driven in the tent-pegs of home, the forest
now and then swallowing them, the mountains rising above them like a
blank wall, and then suddenly opening out before them; and the rustle and
scamper of squirrels and coyotes; and over their heads the whistle of
birds, the slow beat of wings of great wild-fowl. The tender sap of
youth was in this glowing and alert new world, and, by sudden contrast
with the prison walls which he had just left behind, the earth seemed
recreated, unfamiliar, compelling and companionable. Strange that in all
the years that had been since he had gone back to his abandoned home to
find Marcile gone, the world had had no beauty, no lure for him. In the
splendour of it all, he had only raged and stormed, hating his fellowman,
waiting, however hopelessly, for the day when he should see Marcile and
the man who had taken her from him. And yet now, under the degradation