g 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 inevitable reaction, 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 brakes. What hellish thing drives me? Why can't
I end it all? What is left? Only that damned unquenchable spirit of the
gun-fighter to live--to hang on to miserable life--to have no fear of
death, yet to cling like a leach--to die as gun-fighters seldom die,
with boots off! Bain, you were first, and you're long avenged. I'd
change with you. And Sellers, you were last, and you're avenged. And you
others--you're avenged. Lie quiet in your graves and give me peace!"

But they did not lie quiet in their graves and give him peace.

A group of specters trooped out of the shadows of dusk and, gathering
round him, escorted him to his bed.

When Duane had been riding the trails passion-bent to escape pursuers,
or passion-bent in his search, the constant action and toil and
exhaustion made him sleep. But when in hiding, as time passed, gradually
he required less rest and sleep, and his mind became more active. Little
by little his phantoms gained hold on him, and at length, but for the
saving power of his dreams, they would have claimed him utterly.

How many times he had said to himself: "I am an intelligent man. I'm
not crazy. I'm in full possession of my faculties. All this is
fancy--imagination--conscience. I've no work, no duty, no ideal, no
hope--and my mind is obsessed, thronged with images. And these images
naturally are of the men with whom I have dealt. I can't forget them.
They come back to me, hour after hour; and when my tort