d
senses hordes of crowding Titans, pressing in ponderously to smother
and bury him. He felt that he must fend them off; hold back from
crushing and fatal assault the very mountains and the pitchiness of
death--for a while yet--until his task was finished.

Above all he must think. No man could defeat death, but, for a
sufficient cause and with dauntless temper of resolution, a man might
postpone it. He must win Blossom's battle before he fell. He swayed
drunkenly in his saddle and gasped in his effort to breathe as a hooked
fish gasps, out of water.

It seemed that on his breast lay all the massiveness of the rock-built
ranges and at his reason licked fiery tongues of lunacy so that he had
constant need to remind himself of his mission.

There was some task that he had set out to accomplish--but it wavered
into shadowy vagueness. There were scores of mountains to be pushed
back and a heavy, sagging thing which he carried in his arms, to be
delivered somewhere--before it was too late.

His mind wandered and his lips chattered crazy, fever-born things, but
to his burden he clung, with a grim survival of instinctive purpose.
Sometimes an inarticulate and stifled sound came stertorously from the
swollen lips of the weltering body that sagged across the horse's
withers--but that was all, and it failed to recall the custodian from
the nightmare shades of delirium.

But the night was keenly edged with frost and as the plodding mount
splashed across shallow fords its hooves broke through a thin rime of
ice. That same cold touch laid its restoring influence on Turner
Stacy's pounding temples. His eyes saw and recognized the setting of
the evening star--and something lucid came back to him. To him the
evening star meant Blossom. He remembered now. He was taking a
bridegroom to the woman he loved--and the bridegroom must be delivered
alive.

Jerking himself painfully up in his saddle, he bent his head. "Air ye
alive?" he demanded fiercely, but there was no response. He shifted his
burden a little and held his ear close. The lips were still breathing,
though with broken fitfulness.

His fever would return, Bear Cat told himself, in intermittent waves,
and he must utilize to the full the available periods of reason.
Henderson would bleed to death unless his wounds were promptly
staunched. Liquor must be forced down his throat if he were to last to
Brother Fulkerson's house with life enough to say "I will."

Since the daw