ane. We must remember that the man was almost as wretched
as he was wicked; if punishment makes amends for crime, his was in part
absolved. As he walked about with the girl he thought over and over, Will
it kill her? He tried to answer, No. Another voice persisted in saying,
Yes. In his desperation he at last replied, Let it!

We must follow Texas Smith. He had not started on his errand until he had
received five hundred dollars in gold, and five hundred in a draft on San
Francisco. Then he had himself proposed, "I mought quit the train, an'
take my own resk acrost the plains." This being agreed to, he had mounted
his horse, slipped away through the willows, and ridden into the desert
after Thurstane.

He knew the trail; he had been from Cactus Pass to Diamond River and back
again; he knew it at least as well as the man whose life he was tracking.
He thought he remembered the spring where Glover had broken down, and felt
pretty sure that it could not be less than twenty miles from the camp.
Mounted as he was, he could put himself ahead of Thurstane and ambush him
in some ravine. Of a sudden he laughed. It was not a burst of merriment,
but a grim wrinkling of his dark, haggard cheeks, followed by a hissing
chuckle. Texas seldom laughed, and with good reason, for it was enough to
scare people.

"Mought be done," he muttered. "Mought git the better of 'em all that way.
Shute, 'an then yell. The greasers'ud think it was Injuns, an' they'd
travel for camp. Then I'd stop the spare mules an' start for Californy."

For Texas this plan was a stroke of inspiration. He was not an intelligent
scoundrel. All his acumen, though bent to the one point of roguery, had
barely sufficed hitherto to commit murders and escape hanging. He had
never prospered financially, because he lacked financial ability. He was a
beast, with all a tiger's ferocity, but with hardly more than a tiger's
intelligence. He was a savage numskull. An Apache Tonto would have been
more than his match in the arts of murder, and very nearly his match in
the arts of civilization.

Instead of following Thurstane directly, he made a circuit of several
miles through a ravine, galloped across a wide grassy plain, and pulled up
among some rounded hillocks. Here, as he calculated, he was fifteen miles
from camp, and five from the spot where lay Glover and Sweeny. The moon
had already gone down and left the desert to the starlight. Posting
himself behind a thicket, he wai