the evil's turn, and like one hypnotized,
he was led on.

He sat his horse among them, pale and calm, but with a cruel instinct
flashing in his eyes. At least, so Jud Carpenter interpreted the mood
which lay upon him; but no one knew the secret workings of this man's
heart, save God.

He had come to them haggard and blanched and with a nameless dread,
his arm tied up where the dog's fang had been buried in his flesh,
his heart bitter in the thought of the death that was his. Already he
felt the deadly virus pulsing through his veins. A hundred times in
the short hour that had passed he suffered death--death beginning
with the gripping throat, the shortened breath, the foaming mouth,
the spasm!

He jerked in the saddle--that spasmodic chill of the nerves,--and he
grew white and terribly silent at the thought of it--the death that
was his!

Was his! And then he thought: "No, there shall be another and quicker
way to die. A braver way--like a Travis--with my boots on--my boots
on--and not like a mad-dog tied to a stake.

"Besides--Alice--Alice!"

She had gone out of his life. Could such a thing be and he live to
tell it? Alice--love--ambition--the future--life! Alice, hazel-eyed
and glorious, with hair the smell of which filled his soul with
perfume as from the stars. She who alone uplifted him--she another's,
and that other Tom Travis!

Tom Travis--returned and idealized--with him, the joint heir of The
Gaffs.

And that mad-dog--that damned mad-dog! And if perchance he was
saved--if that virus was sucked out of his veins, it was she--Helen!

"This is the place to die," he said grimly--"here with my boots on.
To die like a Travis and unravel this thing called life. Unravel it
to the end of the thread and know if it ends there, is snapped, is
broken or--

"Or--my God," he cried aloud, "I never knew what those two little
letters meant before--not till I face them this way, on the Edge of
Things!"

He gathered the mob together and led them against the jail--with
hoots and shouts and curses; with flaming torches, and crow-bars,
with axes and old guns.

"Lynch her--lynch the old witch! and hang that devil Conway with
her!" was the shout.

In front of the jail they stopped, for a man stood at the door. His
left arm was in a sling, but in his right hand gleamed something that
had proved very deadly before. And he stood there as he had stood in
the edge of the wood, and the bonfires and torches of the mob lit u