t 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.