forgotten. Lygon wished to forget, but Dupont remembered, and meant now
to reap fresh profit by the remembrance.

Dupont was coming to-night, and the hatchet of crime was to be dug up
again. So it had been planned. As the shadows fell, Lygon roused
himself from his trance with a shiver. It was not cold, but in him there
was a nervous agitation, making him cold from head to foot; his body
seemed as impoverished as his mind. Looking with heavy-lidded eyes
across the prairie, he saw in the distance the barracks of the Riders of
the Plains and the jail near by, and his shuddering ceased. There was
where he belonged, within four stone walls; yet here he was free to go
where he willed, to live as he willed, with no eye upon him. With no eye
upon him? There was no eye, but there was the Whisperer whom he could
never drive away. Morning and night he heard the words, "You--you--you!
Fire, and blood, and shame!" He had snatched sleep when he could find
it, after long, long hours of tramping over the plains, ostensibly to
shoot wild fowl, but in truth to bring on a great bodily fatigue--and
sleep. His sleep only came then in the first watches of the night. As
the night wore on the Whisperer began again, as the cloud of weariness
lifted a little from him, and the senses were released from the heavy
sedative of unnatural exertion.

.........................

The dusk deepened. The moon slowly rose. He cooked his scanty meal,
and took a deep draught from a horn of whiskey from beneath a board in
the flooring. He had not the courage to face Dupont without it, nor yet
to forget what he must forget, if he was to do the work Dupont came to
arrange--he must forget the girl who had saved his life and the influence
of those strange moments in which she had spoken down to him, in the