ittle while he turned from her and
she could see only his back--with shoulders that twitched a little from
time to time under the spasmodic assault of some torturing thought. She
was glad that she could not see his eyes. Had there been any place of
retreat, save that room where death lay, she would have fled, because
when a man stands in his place of Gethsemane he should be alone.

But before Boone's mental vision, a vision from which a bloody and
darkening veil seemed to be drawing slowly aside, were passing pictures
out of his memory. He saw grave eyes, clouded with the embarrassment of
talking self, as the tall figure of Victor McCalloway stood in the woods
admitting that he had refused a commission in China, because a mountain
boy might need him in his fight against an inherited wormwood of
bitterness. He saw himself now an apostate to a faith he had embraced; a
doctrine he had both learned and taught. Boone Wellver was waking out of
an ugly trance, but he was not waking without struggle, not without
counter waves that threatened to engulf him again, not without the sweat
of agony.

The crystal into which he gazed cleared and clouded; clouded and
cleared. He could not yet be sure of himself. While he stood with that
stress upon him still in molten indecision, he was not quite sure
whether he heard the girl's voice, or whether it came to him from memory
of other days, as it had sounded under dogwood blossoming on the crest
of Slag-face:

"Comes now to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold, edged with dear bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!"

It was, however, a real voice though a faint one, that came next to his
ears.

"You said these wild sheep were your people--that you owed them what you
could give them--of leadership."

Boone wheeled, and his voice broke from him like a sob, as the watch
slipped from his fingers and fell, shattered.

"Do you mean to go through with it--you and Morgan?"

But before she could shape a response, his hand came up and he went on
in excited haste: "No, don't answer. You didn't come to answer
questions." Then, with a long intake of breath and an abrupt change to
flint hardness again, he added: "It was I who was to answer you. You are
right. I was a damned quitter. These _are_ my people, and I belong to
them--but not to the feud-war, to myself--nor to you."

"Boone," began Anne Masters, but she got no further than that, for the