he immensity of the desert.
If she had been asleep she would have awakened while passing there.
There was not a light. Flat patches and pale gleams, a long, wan length
of bare street, shadows everywhere--these marked Benton's grave.

Allie stared with strained eyes. They were there--in the
blackness--those noble men who had died for her in vain. No--not in
vain! She breathed a prayer for them--a word of love for Larry. Larry,
the waster of life, yet the faithful, the symbol of brotherhood. As long
as she lived she would see him stalk before her with his red, blazing
fire, his magnificent effrontery, his supreme will. He, who had been the
soul of chivalry, the meekest of men before a woman, the inheritor of
a reverence for womanhood, had ruthlessly shot out of his way that
wonderful white-armed Beauty Stanton.

She, too, must lie there in the shadow. Allie shivered with the cool
desert wind that blew in her face from the shadowy spaces. She shut her
eyes to hide the dim passing traces of terrible Benton and the darkness
that hid the lonely graves.

The train moved on and on, leaving what had been Benton far behind; and
once more Allie opened her weary eyes to the dim, obscure reaches of the
desert. Her heart beat very slowly under its leaden weight, its
endless pang. Her blood flowed at low ebb. She felt the long-forgotten
recurrence of an old morbid horror, like a poison lichen fastening upon
the very spring of life. It passed and came again, and left her
once more. Her thoughts wandered back along the night track she had
traversed, until again her ears were haunted by that strange sound which
had given Roaring City its name. She had been torn away from hope, love,
almost life itself. Where was Neale? He had turned from her, obedient
to Allison Lee and the fatal complexity and perversenes's of life. The
vindication of her spiritual faith and the answer to her prayers lay
in the fact that she had been saved; but rather than to be here in this
car, daughter of a rich father, but separated from Neale, she would have
preferred to fill one of the nameless graves in Benton.

33

The sun set pale-gold and austere as Neale watched the train bear Allie
Lee away. No thought of himself entered into that solemn moment of
happiness. Allie Lee--alive--safe--her troubles ended--on her way home
with her father! The long train wound round the bold bluff and at last
was gone. For Neale the moment held something big, final. A p