sent were all the trumps.

It was characteristic of the cattleman that, with the full realization
of his danger, should come a great calm. He had too lively an
imagination to be called a man of iron nerve, for that quality of
courage is not so often a virtue as a lack of sensitiveness. He who is
courageous because he knows no fear is not so brave by half as he who
gauges the extent of his peril and rises superior to it. Wade's courage
was of the latter sort, an ascendancy of the mind over the flesh.
Whenever danger threatened him, his nerves responded to his need with
the precision of the taut strings of a perfectly tuned fiddle under a
master hand. He had been more nervous, many a time, over the thought of
some one of his men riding a dangerous horse or turning a stampede, than
he was now that his own life seemed threatened.

Shrugging his broad shoulders, he rolled and smoked a cigarette. The
slight exhilaration of the smoke, acting on his weakened condition,
together with the slight dizziness still remaining from the blow on his
head, was far from conducing to clear thinking, but he forced himself to
careful thought. He was less concerned about himself than he was about
Santry and Dorothy; particularly Dorothy, for he had now come to
appreciate how closely she had come into his life. Her sympathy had been
very sweet to him, but he told himself that he would be sorry to have
her worry about him now, when there was so little chance of their seeing
each other again. He had no great hope of rescue. He expected to die,
either by violence or by the slower process of starvation, but in either
case he meant to meet his fate like a man.

Of Helen Rexhill, he thought now with a sense of distaste. It was
altogether unlikely that she had been privy to her father's
depredations, but certainly she countenanced them by her presence in
Crawling Water, and she had shown up so poorly in contrast with Dorothy
Purnell that Wade could not recall his former tenderness for his early
sweetheart. Even if great good fortune should enable him to escape from
his prison, the interests of the Rexhill family were too far removed
from his own to be ever again bridged by the tie of love, or even of
good-feeling. He could not blame the daughter for the misdeeds of her
parent, but the old sentiment could never be revived. It was not for
Helen that the instinct of self-preservation stirred within him, nor was
it in her eyes that he would look for the