ts _you_."

"Will they all follow me?"

"Straight inter hell, they will!"

"And yet you think"--Boone looked full into the direct eyes of the other
with a glint of challenge in his own--"yet you think I ought to quiet
them instead of leading them?"

"Leading them which way, Boone? Whatever ther rest aims at, you an' me,
we stan's fer law and peace, don't we? That's what you've always drilled
into me, like gospel."

To his astonishment Joe had, for answer, a mirthless, almost derisive,
laugh--a laugh that was barked.

"So far we've stood for that, and what have we gained?" Boone's mood,
which had been all day seething like the imprisoned fire-flood of a
volcano, burst now in lava-flow through the ruptured crater of
repression. "Asa abided by the law seven years and more ago--didn't he?
Well, he's rotted in a cell ever since! Saul Fulton played with the law
and the law played with him and paid him Judas money and made him rich!
You say they'll follow me. Then, before God in heaven, I'll lead them to
a cleansing by fire! When we finish the job, those murderers and
perjurers will be done for once and for all!"

"And you," the deputy sheriff reminded him soberly, "you'll be plumb
ruint."

"I'm ruined now."

* * * * *

It was not a handsome room in which the two men stood, and Boone had
taken it with a provident eye to its cheapness, but it was in a hotel
stone-built in the times of long ago, and from the days of Henry Clay
and John C. Breckinridge to the time when Goebel died there history had
had birth between those heavy walls.

In the cheaply furnished bedroom whose paper was faded, the observant
eyes of Joe Gregory had caught one detail that struck his simple
interest, even in the surge of weightier tides.

A massive silver photograph frame lay face downward on the table as
though it had been inadvertently over-turned.

Now with a sudden gesture Boone picked it up and held it in his hand a
moment. His eyes centred their blazing scrutiny on it with a fixity
which the ruder mountaineer did not miss. For a moment only Boone held
the frame, out of which looked Anne Masters' face before his gaze; then
he replaced it on the table. He did not stand it up but laid it face
down, and in the moment of that little pantomime and the quality of the
gesture the visitor read something illuminating. He felt with an
instinctive surety that he had seen an idol dethroned, and the
mysterious w