aceful affair
with Hester Harvey?

"I do not care to discuss the matter with you!" she said, her lips stiff.

"Ha, ha!" The bitter derision in his laugh made her blood riot with
hatred. He walked toward the door and took up the rifle, dimly remembering
she had used the same words to him once before, when he had met her as she
had been riding toward Manti. Of course she wouldn't discuss such a
thing--he had been a blind fool to think she would. But it proved her
guilt. Swinging the rifle under his arm, he opened the door, turned when
on the threshold and bowed to her.

"I'm sorry I troubled you, Miss Benham," he said. He essayed to turn,
staggered, looked vacantly around the room, his lips in a queerly cold
half-smile, and then without uttering a sound pitched forward, one
shoulder against the door jamb, and slid slowly to his knees, where he
rested, his head sinking limply to his chest. He heard the girl cry out
sharply and he raised his head with an effort and smiled reassuringly at
her, and when he felt her hands on his arm, trying to lift him, he laughed
aloud in self-derision and got to his feet, hanging to the door jamb.

"I'm sorry, Miss Benham," he mumbled. "I lost some blood, I suppose.
Rotten luck, isn't it. I shouldn't have stopped." He turned to go, lurched
forward and would have fallen out of the door had not the girl seized and
steadied him.

He did not resist when she dragged him into the room and closed the door,
but he waved her away when she tried to take his arm and lead him toward
the kitchen where, she insisted, she would prepare a stimulant and food
for him. He tottered after her, tall and gaunt, his big, lithe figure
strangely slack, his head rocking, the room whirling around him. He had
held to the record and the rifle; the latter by the muzzle, dragging it
after him, the record under his arm.

But his marvelous constitution, a result of his clean living and outdoor
life, responded quickly to the stimulation of food and hot drinks, and in
half an hour he got up, still a little weak, but with some color in his
cheeks, and shame-facedly thanked the girl. He realized now, that he
should not have come here; the past few hours loomed in his thoughts like
a wild nightmare in which he had lost his sense of proportion, yielding to
the elemental passions that had been aroused in his long, sleepless
struggle, making him act upon impulses that he would have frowned
contemptuously away in a normal frame