idge top was rocky and not well adapted for Jean's purpose. He
had to abandon the idea of crawling up on the rustler. Whereupon, Jean
turned back, patiently and slowly, to get his rifle.

Upon securing it he began to retrace his course, this time more slowly
than before, as he was hampered by the rifle. But he did not make the
slightest sound, and at length he reached the edge of the open ridge
top, once more to espy the dark form of the rustler silhouetted against
the sky. The distance was not more than fifty yards.

As Jean rose to his knee and carefully lifted his rifle round to avoid
the twigs of a juniper he suddenly experienced another emotion besides
the one of grim, hard wrath at the Jorths. It was an emotion that
sickened him, made him weak internally, a cold, shaking, ungovernable
sensation. Suppose this man was Ellen Jorth's father! Jean lowered
the rifle. He felt it shake over his knee. He was trembling all over.
The astounding discovery that he did not want to kill Ellen's
father--that he could not do it--awakened Jean to the despairing nature
of his love for her. In this grim moment of indecision, when he knew
his Indian subtlety and ability gave him a great advantage over the
Jorths, he fully realized his strange, hopeless, and irresistible love
for the girl. He made no attempt to deny it any longer. Like the
night and the lonely wilderness around him, like the inevitableness of
this Jorth-Isbel feud, this love of his was a thing, a fact, a reality.
He breathed to his own inward ear, to his soul--he could not kill Ellen
Jorth's father. Feud or no feud, Isbel or not, he could not
deliberately do it. And why not? There was no answer. Was he not
faithless to his father? He had no hope of ever winning Ellen Jorth.
He did not want the love of a girl of her character. But he loved her.
And his struggle must be against the insidious and mysterious growth of
that passion. It swayed him already. It made him a coward. Through
his mind and heart swept the memory of Ellen Jorth, her beauty and
charm, her boldness and pathos, her shame and her degradation. And the
sweetness of her outweighed the boldness. And the mystery of her
arrayed itself in unquenchable protest against her acknowledged shame.
Jean lifted his face to the heavens, to the pitiless white stars, to
the infinite depths of the dark-blue sky. He could sense the fact of
his being an atom in the universe of nature. What was he, what