icion no falsity."

But when Sim had left him Hump Doane stood there while the sunset faded,
while the afterglow livened and died, while the cold twilight settled.

He was thinking of the son he loved and despised, of the soft human
metal that had been hammered into debauchery by this other man whom he
had trusted.

He was acknowledging, too, that if the riders numbered among their
secret adherents such men as Bas Rowlett and his own boy, his fight was
upon a poison that had struck deeper and more malignantly into the
arteries of the community than he had heretofore dreamed.

He must talk with Parish Thornton, whose strength and judgment could be
trusted. He would see him to-night.

But at that point he halted. As yet he could not reveal his
unsubstantiated information to another. A pledge of sacredly observed
confidence had been the price of his learning these things--and over
there at the Thornton house a baby was expected before long. It would be
both wise and considerate to defer the interview that must of necessity
bring the whole crisis to violent issue until the young father's
thoughts were less personally involved. It was a time to make haste
slowly. Old Hump Doane laughed bitterly. He was a father himself, and
to-night he had learned how the heart of a parent can be battered.

But before he went to his bed he had talked with his son, while his son
sat cowering. It had been a stormy interview during which Pete had
denied, expostulated, and at the end broken down in confession, and when
Hump Doane rose he had abandoned that slender shred of hope to which, in
the teeth of conviction, he had been clinging, that his boy might still
be able to clear himself.

"Ye've done lied ter me, an' ye've done broke my heart," declared the
hunchback, slowly, "but ye've done confessed--an' I'm too damn weak ter
turn ye over ter ther law like my duty demands. Don't nuver go ter no
other meetin', an' ef they questions why ye don't come, tell 'em ter ask
me! An' now"--the old man crumpled forward and buried his great head in
his knotted hands--"an' now git outen my sight fer a spell, fer I kain't
endure ther sight of ye!"

But when he rode abroad the next day no man suspected the cataclysm
which had shattered Hump Doane's world into a chaos of irretrievable
wreck.

A closer guard of caution than ever before he set upon his speech and
bearing, while he sought to run down those devastating truths that had
come to him with s