ured mind grows
weak, then maybe I'm not just right till the mood wears out and lets me
sleep."

So he reasoned as he lay down in his comfortable camp. The night was
star-bright above the canon-walls, darkly shadowing down between them.
The insects hummed and chirped and thrummed a continuous thick song, low
and monotonous. Slow-running water splashed softly over stones in the
stream-bed. From far down the canon came the mournful hoot of an owl.
The moment he lay down, thereby giving up action for the day, all these
things weighed upon him like a great heavy mantle of loneliness. In
truth, they did not constitute loneliness.

And he could no more have dispelled thought than he could have reached
out to touch a cold, bright star.

He wondered how many outcasts like him lay under this star-studded,
velvety sky across the fifteen hundred miles of wild country between
El Paso and the mouth of the river. A vast wild territory--a refuge for
outlaws! Somewhere he had heard or read that the Texas Rangers kept a
book with names and records of outlaws--three thousand known outlaws.
Yet these could scarcely be half of that unfortunate horde which had
been recruited from all over the states. Duane had traveled from camp to
camp, den to den, hiding-place to hiding-place, and he knew these men.
Most of them were hopeless criminals; some were avengers; a few were
wronged wanderers; and among them occasionally was a man, human in his
way, honest as he could be, not yet lost to good.

But all of them were akin in one sense--their outlawry; and that starry
night they lay with their dark faces up, some in packs like wolves,
others alone like the gray wolf who knew no mate. It did not make much
difference in Duane's thought of them that the majority were steeped in
crime and brutality, more often than not stupid from rum, incapable of a
fine feeling, just lost wild dogs.

Duane doubted that there was a man among them who did not realize his
moral wreck and ruin. He had met poor, half witted wretches who knew it.
He believed he could enter into their minds and feel the truth of
all their lives--the hardened outlaw, coarse, ignorant, bestial, who
murdered as Bill Black had murdered, who stole for the sake of stealing,
who craved money to gamble and drink, defiantly ready for death, and,
like that terrible outlaw, Helm, who cried out on the scaffold, "Let her
rip!"

The wild youngsters seeking notoriety and reckless adventure; the
cow