an the town supposed. Bill had
carried to his friend--hidden in the crevice in the mountain-top--the
news of Red Kimball's death; since then, they had not seen each other.

Skulking along wooded gullies by day, creeping down into the cove at
night, Willock had unconsciously reverted to the habits of thought and
action belonging to the time of his outlawry. He was again, in spirit,
a highwayman, though his hostility was directed only against those
seeking to bring him to justice. The softening influence of the years
spent with Lahoma was no longer apparent in his shifting bloodshot
eyes, his crouching shoulders, his furtive hand ever ready to snatch
the weapon from concealment. This sinister aspect of wildness,
intensified by straggling whiskers and uncombed locks, gave to his
giant form a kinship to the huge grotesquely shaped rocks among which
he had made his den.

He heard of Red Kimball's death with bitter disappointment. He had
hoped to encounter his former chief, to grapple with him, to hurl him,
perhaps, from the precipice overlooking Bill's former home. If in his
fall, Kimball, with arms wound about his waist, had dragged him down to
the same death, what matter? Though his enemy was now no more, the
sheriff held the warrant for his arrest--as if the dead man could still
strike a mortal blow. The sheriff might be overcome--he was but a man.
That piece of paper calling for his arrest--an arrest that would mean,
at best, years in the penitentiary--had behind it the whole state of
Texas.

To Willock's feverish imagination, the warrant became personified; a
mysterious force, not to be destroyed by material means; it was not
only paper, but spirit. And it had come between him and Lahoma, it had
shut him off from the possibility of a peaceful old age. The cove was
no longer home but a hiding-place.

He did not question the justice of this sequel to his earlier life. No
doubt deeds of long ago, never punished, demanded a sacrifice. He hated
the agents of this justice not so much because they threatened his
liberty, his life, as because they stepped in between himself and
Lahoma. Always a man of expedients, he now sought some way of
frustrating justice, and naturally his plans took the color of
violence. Denied the savage joy of killing Red Kimball--and he would
have killed him with as little compunction as if he had been a
wolf--his thoughts turned toward Gledware.

Gledware was the only witness of the d