wide-eyed nightmare!

While the spell of his stunned heart held him in the thrall of
inaction, Henderson and Blossom parted with slow reluctance and took up
their opposite direction of journey.

Left alone, like a man sitting, shaken and demoralized, upon the broken
debris of a wrecked universe, Turner stared ahead with a dull
incredulity. But inaction was foreign to his nature and after a while
he rose unsteadily to his feet. He turned and started at a swift stride
which broke presently into a dog-trot along the way Henderson had
taken; then he hesitated, halted and wheeled in his tracks.

"No!" he exclaimed. "No, by God, ef I meets up with _him_ the way I
feels now, I'll kill him afore he has ther chanst ter speak with me. I
kain't govern myself. I aims ter let _her_ tell hit to me her own
self!"

So he altered his direction and went plunging westward.

A short route through broken rock and tangled brush enabled him to cut
ahead of Blossom's course so that, turning an abrupt angle in the
trail, the girl found him standing before her with clenched hands and a
face so set and pale that she started back. It seemed to her that,
instead of himself, it was his ghost which confronted her.

With a slow and stifled outcry, at the apparition, she carried her
hands to her face, then broke into convulsive sobs.

"I didn't aim ter eavesdrop, Blossom," said Turner, his sternness
wavering before her tears. "But I seed ye givin' yore lips ter Jerry
Henderson back thar. Hit seems ter me like I kin almost discern the
stain of thet kiss soilin' em now. I reckon I ought rightfully ter hev
speech with him fust--but I knowed I'd kill him ef I did--an' so I held
my hand twell I'd done seed _you_."

They were both trembling, and the girl's hands came slowly away from a
face pitifully agitated. Her voice was a whisper.

"Ye mustn't censure me, Turney," she huskily protested. "I'm
plighted--ter _him_."

"Plighted!" The word broke from the man as explosively as an oath, then
after a moment's silence she heard him saying, in a slow and stunned
fashion: "I 'lowed thet ye war all but plighted to _me_."

"I knows--I knows, Turney," she pleaded desperately. "I wants thet ye
should understand. I thought thet I loved ye--I _do_ love ye better
then ef ye war my own blood brother--but I didn't know afore now ther
kind of love thet--thet----"

"Thet Jerry Henderson's done stole from me," he finished for her, in a
voice she had never before