sunrise
one morning on his way to her house, when his alert gaze caught an
indistinct movement through the hazy half-light of the dawn. He could
make out only that two figures seemed coming west along the mist-veiled
path and that they appeared to be the figures of a man and a woman.

Surprised to encounter travelers at so remote a spot at that hour, he
edged cautiously into the underbrush and lay flat on a huge rock which
overlooked the path from a low eminence at its right.

They had halted just beyond the range of hearing, but when with
mountain suddenness, like a torn curtain, the half-light became
full-light he froze into a petrified astonishment which seemed to have
clutched and squeezed all the vitality out of his heart, and to have
left his blood currentless.

The abrupt revelation of light had fallen on the bright hair of Blossom
Fulkerson and the dark uncovered head of Jerry Henderson; and before
the monstrous incredibility of the situation could be fully grasped,
the girl, to whom he had bade farewell as his acknowledged sweetheart,
had thrown her arms around the neck of the man to whose loyal care he
had confided her, and that man was kissing her with a lover's ardor!

What their words might be he could not tell--but their clinging embrace
said enough--and Blossom was giving her lips with eager willingness.

[Illustration: What their words might be he could not tell--but their
clinging embrace said enough]

Bear Cat lay for a moment, sick, dizzy and motionless while a groan,
which never reached his lips, spasmodically shook his chest and
shoulders. Succeeding that paralyzed instant, a fever of unspeakable
fury surged over him and while all the rest of his body stretched
unstirring, his arms slipped forward and the muzzle of his rifle crept
over the ledge of rock. But that, too, was only a response to instinct
and the thumb halted in the act of cocking the hammer. His vengeance
called not only for satisfaction but for glutting.

Henderson must die face to face with him, not by the stealth of
ambuscade, but by open violence to be administered with bare
hands--realizing the cause of his punishment--dying by inches!

But as he was on the point of rising to confront them, something
arrested him: the stupor of a man whose mind and heart had trusted so
implicitly that they could not yet fully credit even the full
demonstration of his eyes. This must, despite all its certainty, be
some hallucination--some