s,
with their dark secrets locked in their hearts.

After a while Wilson put some sticks on the red embers, then pulled the
end of a log over them. A blaze sputtered up, changing the dark circle
and showing the sleepers with their set, shadowed faces upturned. Wilson
gazed on all of them, a sardonic smile on his lips, and then his look
fixed upon the sleeper apart from the others--Riggs. It might have been
the false light of flame and shadow that created Wilson's expression of
dark and terrible hate. Or it might have been the truth, expressed
in that lonely, unguarded hour, from the depths of a man born in the
South--a man who by his inheritance of race had reverence for all
womanhood--by whose strange, wild, outlawed bloody life of a gun-fighter
he must hate with the deadliest hate this type that aped and mocked his
fame.

It was a long gaze Wilson rested upon Riggs--as strange and secretive as
the forest wind moaning down the great aisles--and when that dark gaze
was withdrawn Wilson stalked away to make his bed with the stride of one
ill whom spirit had liberated force.

He laid his saddle in front of the spruce shelter where the girl had
entered, and his tarpaulin and blankets likewise and then wearily
stretched his long length to rest.

The camp-fire blazed up, showing the exquisite green and brown-flecked
festooning of the spruce branches, symmetrical and perfect, yet so
irregular, and then it burned out and died down, leaving all in the dim
gray starlight. The horses were not moving around; the moan of night
wind had grown fainter; the low hum of insects was dying away; even
the tinkle of the brook had diminished. And that growth toward absolute
silence continued, yet absolute silence was never attained. Life abided
in the forest; only it had changed its form for the dark hours.

Anson's gang did not bestir themselves at the usual early sunrise hour
common to all woodsmen, hunters, or outlaws, to whom the break of day
was welcome. These companions--Anson and Riggs included--might have
hated to see the dawn come. It meant only another meager meal, then
the weary packing and the long, long ride to nowhere in particular,
and another meager meal--all toiled for without even the necessities of
satisfactory living, and assuredly without the thrilling hopes that
made their life significant, and certainly with a growing sense of
approaching calamity.

The outlaw leader rose surly and cross-grained. He had to boo