grass, for there was none. Presently he heard the horse
tramping along, and then he ran. The mud was deep, and the

sharp thorns made going difficult. He came up with the horse,
and at the same moment crossed a multitude of fresh

horse-tracks.
He bent lower to examine them, and was alarmed to find that

they had been made very recently, even since it had ceased
raining. They were tracks of well-shod horses. Duane

straightened up with a cautious glance all around. His instant
decision was to hurry back to Jennie. But he had come a goodly

way through the thicket, and it was impossible to rush back.
Once or twice he imagined he heard crashings in the brush, but

did not halt to make sure. Certain he was now that some kind of
danger threatened.

Suddenly there came an unmistakable thump of horses' hoofs off
somewhere to the fore. Then a scream rent the air. It ended

abruptly. Duane leaped forward, tore his way through the thorny
brake. He heard Jennie cry again--an appealing call quickly

hushed. It seemed more to his right, and he plunged that way.
He burst into a glade where a smoldering fire and ground

covered with footprints and tracks showed that campers had
lately been. Rushing across this, he broke his passage out to

the open. But he was too late. His horse had disappeared.
Jennie was gone. There were no riders in sight. There was no

sound. There was a heavy trail of horses going north. Jennie
had been carried off--probably by outlaws. Duane realized that

pursuit was out of the question--that Jennie was lost.
CHAPTER X

A hundred miles from the haunts most familiar with Duane's
deeds, far up where the Nueces ran a trickling clear stream

between yellow cliffs, stood a small deserted shack of covered
mesquite poles. It had been made long ago, but was well

preserved. A door faced the overgrown trail, and another faced
down into a gorge of dense thickets. On the border fugitives

from law and men who hid in fear of some one they had wronged
never lived in houses with only one door.

It was a wild spot, lonely, not fit for human habitation except
for the outcast. He, perhaps, might have found it hard to leave

for most of the other wild nooks in that barren country. Down
in the gorge there was never-failing sweet water, grass all the

year round, cool, shady retreats, deer, rabbits, turkeys,
fruit, and miles and miles of narrow-twisting, deep canon full

of broken rocks and impenetrable thickets. The scream of the
panther was heard there, the squall of the wildcat, the cough

of the jaguar. Innumerable bees buzzed in the spring blossoms,
and, it seemed, scattered honey to the winds. All day there was

continuous song of birds, that of the mocking-bird loud and
sweet and mocking above the rest.

On clear days--and rare indeed were cloudy days--with the
subsiding of the wind at sunset a hush seemed to fall around

the little hut. Far-distant dim-blue mountains stood
gold-rimmed gradually to fade with the shading of light.

At this quiet hour a man climbed up out of the gorge and sat in
the westward door of the hut. This lonely watcher of the west

and listener to the silence was Duane. And this hut was the one
where, three years before, Jennie had nursed him back to life.

The killing of a man named Sellers, and the combination of
circumstances that had made the tragedy a memorable regret, had

marked, if not a change, at least a cessation in Duane's
activities. He had trailed Sellers to kill him for the supposed

abducting of Jennie. He had trailed him long after he had
learned Sellers traveled alone. Duane wanted absolute assurance

of Jennie's death. Vague rumors, a few words here and there,
unauthenticated stories, were all Duane had gathered in years

to substantiate his belief--that Jennie died shortly after the
beginning of her second captivity. But Duane did not know

surely. Sellers might have told him. Duane expected, if not to
force it from him at the end, to read it in his eyes. But the

bullet went too unerringly; it locked his lips and fixed his
eyes.

After that meeting Duane lay long at the ranchhouse of a
friend, and when he recovered from the wound Sellers had given

him he started with two horses and a pack for the lonely gorge
on the Nueces. There he had been hidden for months, a prey to

remorse, a dreamer, a victim of phantoms.
It took work for him to find subsistence in that rocky

fastness. And work, action, helped to pass the hours. But he
could not work all the time, even if he had found it to do.

Then in his idle moments and at night his task was to live with
the hell in his mind.

The sunset and the twilight hour made all the rest bearable.
The little hut on the rim of the gorge seemed to hold Jennie's

presence. It was not as if he felt her spirit. If it had been
he would have been sure of her death. He hoped Jennie had not

survived her second misfortune; and that intense hope had
burned into belief, if not surety. Upon his return to that

locality, on the occasion of his first visit to the hut, he had
found things just as they had left them, and a poor, faded

piece of ribbon Jennie had used to tie around her bright hair.
No wandering outlaw or traveler had happened upon the lonely

spot, which further endeared it to Duane.
A strange feature of this memory of Jennie was the freshness of

it--the failure of years, toil, strife, death-dealing to dim
it--to deaden the thought of what might have been. He had a

marvelous gift of visualization. He could shut his eyes and see
Jennie before him just as clearly as if she had stood there in

the flesh. For hours he did that, dreaming, dreaming of life he
had never tasted and now never would taste. He saw Jennie's

slender, graceful figure, the old brown ragged dress in which
he had seen her first at Bland's, her little feet in Mexican

sandals, her fine hands coarsened by work, her round arms and
swelling throat, and her pale, sad, beautiful face with its

staring dark eyes. He remembered every look she had given him,
every word she had spoken to him, every time she had touched

him. He thought of her beauty and sweetness, of the few things
which had come to mean to him that she must have loved him; and

he trained himself to think of these in preference to her life
at Bland's, the escape with him, and then her recapture,

because such memories led to bitter, fruitless pain. He had to
fight suffering because it was eating out his heart.

Sitting there, eyes wide open, he dreamed of the old homestead
and his white-haired mother. He saw the old home life,

sweetened and filled by dear new faces and added joys, go on
before his eyes with him a part of it.

Then in the inevitablereaction, in the reflux of bitter
reality, he would send out a voiceless cry no less poignant

because it was silent: "Poor fool! No, I shall never see mother
again--never go home--never have a home. I am Duane, the Lone

Wolf! Oh, God! I wish it were over! These dreams torture me!
What have I to do with a mother, a home, a wife? No

bright-haired boy, no dark-eyed girl will ever love me. I am an
outlaw, an outcast, dead to the good and decent world. I am

alone--alone. Better be a callous brute or better dead! I shall
go mad thinking! Man, what is left to you? A hiding-place like

a wolf's--lonely silent days, lonely nights with phantoms! Or
the trail and the road with their bloody tracks, and then the

hard ride, the sleepless, hungry ride to some hole in rocks or