that fact, and not once did the thought flash upon him that
this might be only an unusual and startling resemblance. It was assuredly
Culver Rann! The picture dropped from his hand to the table, and he went
toward the door. His first impulse was to go to Joanne. But when he reached
the door he locked it, and dropped into a chair, facing the mirror in his
dresser.

The reflection of his own face was a shock to him. If he was pale, the dust
and grime of his fight in the cavern concealed his pallor. But the face
that stared at him from out of the glass was haggard, wildly and almost
grotesquely haggard, and he turned from it with a grim laugh, and set his
jaws hard. He returned to the table, and bit by bit tore the photograph
into thin shreds, and then piled the shreds on his ash-tray and burned
them. He opened a window to let out the smoke and smell of charring paper,
and the fresh, cool air of early evening struck his face. He could look off
through the fading sunshine of the valley and see the mountain where Coyote
Number Twenty-eight was to have done its work, and as he looked he gripped
the window-sill so fiercely that the nails of his fingers were bent and
broken against the wood. And in his brain the same words kept repeating
themselves over and over again. Mortimer FitzHugh was not dead. He was
alive. He was Culver Rann. And Joanne--Joanne was not _his_ wife; she was
still the wife of Mortimer FitzHugh--of Culver Rann!

He turned again to the mirror, and there was another look in his face. It
was grim, terribly grim--and smiling. There was no excitement, nothing of
the passion and half-madness with which he had faced Quade and Rann the
night before. He laughed softly, and his nails dug as harshly into the
palms of his hands as they had dug into the sills of the window.

"You poor, drivelling, cowardly fool!" he said to his reflection. "And you
dare to say--you dare to _think_ that she is not your wife?"

As if in reply to his words there came a knock at the door, and from the
hall Blackton called:

"Here's MacDonald, Aldous. He wants to see you."

Aldous opened the door and the old hunter entered.

"If I ain't interruptin' you, Johnny----"

"You're the one man in the world I want to see, Mac. No, I'll take that
back; there's one other I want to see worse than you--Culver Rann."

The strange look in his face made old Donald stare.

"Sit down," he said, drawing two chairs close to the table. "There's
someth