oom, only stood by with
his hand outstretched to speed his laggard messenger. The old man
stepped out into the night. Tenison, looking after him, shook his head
doubtfully. But he was doing what he could and he knew that though the
old fellow walked slow, once in a saddle, he could ride fast; and that
for Laramie, he would do it.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE CANYON OF THE FALLING WALL

Laramie, after disposing of his prisoners, had ridden north with less
of a hunted feeling experienced every time he mentally inventoried the
rocks commanding the trail, the boulders looming ahead of him, and the
cottonwoods through which he wound his way along the creek bottoms.
And when at length he looked across Turkey creek, he was not surprised
to see his cows straying down the hills toward their own range.

Even the bitter sight of the ruins of his cabin bore upon him less now
that he had put Van Horn actually in jail for the trick. "You can't
keep him there long," Tenison had cynically warned him.

"I've put the mark on him, if he's only there overnight," had been
Laramie's reply. "He'll be a long time explaining. And I want you to
notice, Harry, with all the fighting they've put me to, they've never
got me locked up yet--not for a second. I guess for that," he added,
reflecting, "I ought to thank my friends."

Never so much as that day had he realized how every aspect of his
situation, as he viewed it, was colored by the thought of Kate
Doubleday. If he were determined that despite any intrigue worked
against him, he would never be locked up alive on a trumped-up charge,
it was chiefly because of the disgrace of such a thing in her eyes. If
he avoided opportunities now of finishing with Van Horn, he knew it was
chiefly because of her. She would probably never see that finish, but
she would hear the story of it from his enemies. Laramie was not at
any time thinking merely of being justified in the last resort, nor of
the justification of his friends, which would in any case be his. But
what would Kate think?

Yet he knew what was ahead of him; he knew what lay at the end of the
trail he and Van Horn were traveling. Lawing, as Sleepy Cat
contemptuously termed it, was the least of it all and the most
futile--yet in thinking of the other, her judgment was what he dreaded.
This bore on him and perplexed him. It had, more than all else, put
two little vertical furrows between his eyebrows; they were there often
of la