Aldous had employed a certain amount of caution, but until he had talked with Stevens he had not believed that Quade, in his twofold desire to avenge himself and possess Joanne, would go to the extraordinary ends predicted by the packer.  His point of view was now entirely changed.  He believed Stevens.  He knew the man was not excitable.  He was one of the coolest heads in the mountains.  And he had abundant nerve.  Thought of Stimson and Stimson’s wife had sent the hot blood through Aldous like fire.  Was Stevens right in that detail?  And was Quade actually planning the same end for him and Joanne?  Why had Quade stolen on ahead to Tete Jaune?  Why had he not waited for to-morrow’s train?

He found himself walking swiftly along the road, where he had intended to walk slowly—­a hundred questions pounding through his brain.  Suddenly a thought came to him that stopped him in the trail, his unseeing eyes staring down into the dark chasm of the river.  After all, was it so strange that Quade would do these things?  Into his own life Joanne had come like a wonderful dream-creature transformed into flesh and blood.  He no longer tried to evade the fact that he could not think without thinking of Joanne.  She had become a part of him.  She had made him forget everything but her, and in a few hours had sent into the dust of ruin his cynicism and aloneness of a lifetime.  If Joanne had come to him like this, making him forget his work, filling him more and more with the thrilling desire to fight for her, was it so very strange that a beast like Quade would fight—­in another way?

He went on down the trail, his hands clenched tightly.  After all, it was not fear of Quade or of what he might attempt that filled him with uneasiness.  It was Joanne herself, her strange quest, its final outcome.  With the thought that she was seeking for the man who was her husband, a leaden hand seemed gripping at his heart.  He tried to shake it off, but it was like a sickness.  To believe that she had been the wife of another man or that she could ever belong to any other man than himself seemed like shutting his eyes forever to the sun.  And yet she had told him.  She had belonged to another man; she might belong to him even now.  She had come to find if he was alive—­or dead.

And if alive?  Aldous stopped again, and looked down into the dark pit through which the river was rushing a hundred feet below him.  It tore in frothing maelstroms through a thousand rocks, filling the night with a low thunder.  To John Aldous the sound of it might have been a thousand miles away.  He did not hear.  His eye saw nothing in the blackness.  For a few moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything.  If they found Joanne’s husband alive at Tete Jaune—­what then?  He turned back, retracing his steps over the trail, a feeling of resentment—­of hatred for the man he had never seen—­slowly taking the place of the oppressive thing that had turned his