rail. Neither could I find any trace of her. She had
moved on, driven, no doubt, by the hound of her past. Since then I
have taken to the wilds, hunting gold on the desert."

"Yes, it's the old, old story, only sadder, I think," said Cameron; and
his voice was strained and unnatural. "Pardner, what Illinois town was
it you hailed from?"

"Peoria."

"And your--your name?" went on Cameron huskily.

"Warren--Jonas Warren."

That name might as well have been a bullet. Cameron stood erect,
motionless, as men sometimes stand momentarily when shot straight
through the heart. In an instant, when thoughts resurged like blinding
flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying, quivering,
terror-stricken man. He mumbled something hoarsely and backed into the
shadow. But he need not have feared discovery, however surely his
agitation might have betrayed him. Warren sat brooding over the
campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in the past.

Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming
thick in his ears, whispering over and over:

"Merciful God! Nell was his daughter!"

III

As thought and feeling multiplied, Cameron was overwhelmed. Beyond
belief, indeed, was it that out of the millions of men in the world two
who had never seen each other could have been driven into the desert by
memory of the same woman. It brought the past so close. It showed
Cameron how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had
happened long ago. That which made life significant to him was a
wandering in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret.
Some fateful chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had
wrecked. It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one
thing of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both
father and lover would have found unendurable.

Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death that
put Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be afraid.
It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man. All
at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's trouble, or
let him stain his hands with blood. He would tell the truth of Nell's
sad story and his own, and make what amends he could.

Then Cameron's thought shifted from fat