to him.

Jean washed the wound Queen had given him and bound it tightly. The
keen pang and burn of the lead was a constant and all-powerful reminder
of the grim work left for him to do. The whole world was no longer
large enough for him and whoever was left of the Jorths. The heritage
of blood his father had bequeathed him, the unshakable love for a
worthless girl who had so dwarfed and obstructed his will and so
bitterly defeated and reviled his poor, romantic, boyish faith, the
killing of hostile men, so strange in its after effects, the pursuits
and fights, and loss of one by one of his confederates--these had
finally engendered in Jean Isbel a wild, unslakable thirst, these had
been the cause of his retrogression, these had unalterably and
ruthlessly fixed in his darkened mind one fierce passion--to live and
die the last man of that Jorth-Isbel feud.

At sunrise Jean left this camp, taking with him only a small knapsack
of meat and bread, and with the eager, wild Shepp in leash he set out
on Queen's bloody trail.

Black drops of blood on the stones and an irregular trail of footprints
proved to Jean that the gunman was hard hit. Here he had fallen, or
knelt, or sat down, evidently to bind his wounds. Jean found strips of
scarf, red and discarded. And the blood drops failed to show on more
rocks. In a deep forest of spruce, under silver-tipped spreading
branches, Queen had rested, perhaps slept. Then laboring with dragging
steps, not improbably with a lame leg, he had gone on, up out of the
dark-green ravine to the open, dry, pine-tipped ridge. Here he had
rested, perhaps waited to see if he were pursued. From that point his
trail spoke an easy language for Jean's keen eye. The gunman knew he
was pursued. He had seen his enemy. Therefore Jean proceeded with a
slow caution, never getting within revolver range of ambush, using all
his woodcraft to trail this man and yet save himself. Queen traveled
slowly, either because he was wounded or else because he tried to
ambush his pursuer, and Jean accommodated his pace to that of Queen.
From noon of that day they were never far apart, never out of hearing
of a rifle shot.

The contrast of the beauty and peace and loneliness of the surroundings
to the nature of Queen's flight often obtruded its strange truth into
the somber turbulence of Jean's mind, into that fixed columnar idea
around which fleeting thoughts hovered and gathered like shadows.

Early frost