?"

Presley shrank a little. Of late the reports of disasters had followed
so swiftly upon one another that he had begun to tremble and to quail at
every unexpected bit of information.

"What news do you mean?" he asked.

"About Dyke. He has been convicted. The judge sentenced him for life."

For life! Riding on by the side of this man through the ranches by
the County Road, Presley repeated these words to himself till the full
effect of them burst at last upon him.

Jailed for life! No outlook. No hope for the future. Day after day, year
after year, to tread the rounds of the same gloomy monotony. He saw the
grey stone walls, the iron doors; the flagging of the "yard" bare of
grass or trees--the cell, narrow, bald, cheerless; the prison garb, the
prison fare, and round all the grim granite of insuperable barriers,
shutting out the world, shutting in the man with outcasts, with the
pariah dogs of society, thieves, murderers, men below the beasts, lost
to all decency, drugged with opium, utter reprobates. To this, Dyke
had been brought, Dyke, than whom no man had been more honest, more
courageous, more jovial. This was the end of him, a prison; this was his
final estate, a criminal.

Presley found an excuse for riding on, leaving S. Behrman behind him.
He did not stop at Caraher's saloon, for the heat of his rage had long
since begun to cool, and dispassionately, he saw things in their true
light. For all the tragedy of his wife's death, Caraher was none the
less an evil influence among the ranchers, an influence that worked only
to the inciting of crime. Unwilling to venture himself, to risk his own
life, the anarchist saloon-keeper had goaded Dyke and Presley both to
murder; a bad man, a plague spot in the world of the ranchers, poisoning
the farmers' bodies with alcohol and their minds with discontent.

At last, Presley arrived at the ranch house of Los Muertos. The place
was silent; the grass on the lawn was half dead and over a foot high;
the beginnings of weeds showed here and there in the driveway. He tied
his horse to a ring in the trunk of one of the larger eucalyptus trees
and entered the house.

Mrs. Derrick met him in the dining-room. The old look of uneasiness,
almost of terror, had gone from her wide-open brown eyes. There was in
them instead, the expression of one to whom a contingency, long
dreaded, has arrived and passed. The stolidity of a settled grief, of an
irreparable calamity, of a despair