new coin gold, as if it had jest come from the United States
treasury. An' the coin's genuine. Thet's all been proved. The

truth is Oldrin's on a rampage. A while back he lost his Masked
Rider, an' they say he's wild about thet. I'm wonderin' if

Lassiter could hev told the rustler anythin' about thet little
masked, hard-ridin' devil. Ride! He was most as good as Jerry

Card. An', Bern, I've been wonderin' if you know--"
"Judkins, you're a good fellow," interrupted Venters. "Some day

I'll tell you a story. I've no time now. Take the horses to
Jane."

Judkins stared, and then, muttering to himself, he mounted Bells,
and stared again at Venters, and then, leading the other horses,

he rode into the grove and disappeared.
Once, long before, on the night Venters had carried Bess through

the canyon and up into Surprise Valley, he had experienced the
strangeness of faculties singularly, tinglingly acute. And now

the same sensation recurred. But it was different in that he felt
cold, frozen, mechanicalincapable of free thought, and all about

him seemed unreal, aloof, remote. He hid his rifle in the sage,
marking its exact location with extreme care. Then he faced down

the lane and strode toward the center of the village. Perceptions
flashed upon him, the faint, cold touch of the breeze, a cold,

silvery tinkle of flowing water, a cold sun shining out of a cold
sky, song of birds and laugh of children, coldly distant. Cold

and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and
tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew

the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his
hands as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low

to his gun-sheaths. Men meeting him in the walk gave him wide
berth. In front of Bevin's store a crowd melted apart for his

passage, and their faces and whispers were faces and whispers of
a dream. He turned a corner to meet Tull face to face, eye to

eye. As once before he had seen this man pale to a ghastly, livid
white so again he saw the change. Tull stopped in his tracks,

with right hand raised and shaking. Suddenly it dropped, and he
seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters's sight. Next he

saw many horses with bridles down--all clean-limbed, dark bays or
blacks--rustlers' horses! Loud voices and boisterous laughter,

rattle of dice and scrape of chair and clink of gold, burst in
mingled din from an open doorway. He stepped inside.

With the sight of smoke-hazed room and drinking, cursing,
gambling, dark-visaged men, reality once more dawned upon

Venters.
His entrance had been unnoticed, and he bent his gaze upon the

drinkers at the bar. Dark-clothed, dark-faced men they all were,
burned by the sun, bow-legged as were most riders of the sage,

but neither lean nor gaunt. Then Venters's gaze passed to the
tables, and swiftly it swept over the hard-featured gamesters, to

alight upon the huge, shaggy, black head of the rustler
chief.

"Oldring!" he cried, and to him his voice seemed to split a bell
in his ears.

It stilled the din.
That silence suddenly broke to the scrape and crash of Oldring's

chair as he rose; and then, while he passed, a great gloomy
figure, again the thronged room stilled in silence yet deeper.

"Oldring, a word with you!" continued Venters.
"Ho! What's this?" boomed Oldring, in frowning scrutiny.

"Come outside, alone. A word for you--from your Masked Rider!"
Oldring kicked a chair out of his way and lunged forward with a

stamp of heavy boot that jarred the floor. He waved down his
muttering, rising men.

Venters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound
had ever before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of

the rustler.
Oldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great

breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his
high-top boots with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a

strange, unintelligible curiosity to see Oldring alive. The
rustler's broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard,

as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder
and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonderfully

charged with vitality and force and strength, seemed to afford
Venters an unutterable fiendish joy because for that magnificent

manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.
"Oldring, Bess is alive! But she's dead to you--dead to the life

you made her lead--dead as you will be in one second!"
Swift as lightning Venters's glance dropped from Oldring's

rolling eyes to his hands. One of them, the right, swept out,
then toward his gun--and Venters shot him through the heart.

Slowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the
gun, fell away. Venters's strangely acute faculties grasped the

meaning of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and
heave, of the quivering beard. But was that awful spirit in the

black eyes only one of vitality?
"Man--why--didn't--you--wait? Bess--was--" Oldring's whisper died

under his beard, and with a heavy lurch he fell
forward.

Bounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the
street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and

garden to the sage. Here, under cover of the tall brush, he
turned west and ran on to the place where he had hidden his

rifle. Securing that, he again set out into a run, and, circling
through the sage, came up behind Jane Withersteen's stable and

corrals. With laboring, dripping chest, and pain as of a knife
thrust in his side, he stopped to regain his breath, and while

resting his eyes roved around in search of a horse. Doors and
windows of the stable were open wide and had a deserted look. One

dejected, lonely burro stood in the near corral. Strange indeed
was the silence brooding over the once happy, noisy home of Jane

Withersteen's pets.
He went into the corral, exercising care to leave no tracks, and

led the burro to the watering-trough. Venters, though not
thirsty, drank till he could drink no more. Then, leading the

burro over hard ground, he struck into the sage and down the
slope.

He strodeswiftly, turning from time to time to scan the slope
for riders. His head just topped the level of sage-brush, and the

burro could not have been seen at all. Slowly the green of
Cottonwoods sank behind the slope, and at last a wavering line of

purple sage met the blue of sky.
To avoid being seen, to get away, to hide his trail--these were

the sole ideas in his mind as he headed for Deception Pass, and
he directed all his acuteness of eye and ear, and the keenness of

a rider's judgment for distance and ground, to stern
accomplishment of the task. He kept to the sage far to the left

of the trail leading into the Pass. He walked ten miles and
looked back a thousand times. Always the graceful, purple wave of

sage remained wide and lonely, a clear, undotted waste. Coming to
a stretch of rocky ground, he took advantage of it to cross the

trail and then continued down on the right. At length he
persuaded himself that he would be able to see riders mounted on

horses before they could see him on the little burro, and he rode
bareback.

Hour by hour the tireless burro kept to his faithful, steady
trot. The sun sank and the long shadows lengthened down the

slope. Moving veils of purpletwilight crept out of the hollows