To avoid being seen, to get away, to hide his trail—­these were the sole ideas in his mind as he headed for Deception Pass, and he directed all his acuteness of eye and ear, and the keenness of a rider’s judgment for distance and ground, to stern accomplishment of the task.  He kept to the sage far to the left of the trail leading into the Pass.  He walked ten miles and looked back a thousand times.  Always the graceful, purple wave of sage remained wide and lonely, a clear, undotted waste.  Coming to a stretch of rocky ground, he took advantage of it to cross the trail and then continued down on the right.  At length he persuaded himself that he would be able to see riders mounted on horses before they could see him on the little burro, and he rode bareback.

Hour by hour the tireless burro kept to his faithful, steady trot.  The sun sank and the long shadows lengthened down the slope.  Moving veils of purple twilight crept out of the hollows and, mustering and forming on the levels, soon merged and shaded into night.  Venters guided the burro nearer to the trail, so that he could see its white line from the ridges, and rode on through the hours.

Once down in the Pass without leaving a trail, he would hold himself safe for the time being.  When late in the night he reached the break in the sage, he sent the burro down ahead of him, and started an avalanche that all but buried the animal at the bottom of the trail.  Bruised and battered as he was, he had a moment’s elation, for he had hidden his tracks.  Once more he mounted the burro and rode on.  The hour was the blackest of the night when he made the thicket which inclosed his old camp.  Here he turned the burro loose in the grass near the spring, and then lay down on his old bed of leaves.

He felt only vaguely, as outside things, the ache and burn and throb of the muscles of his body.  But a dammed-up torrent of emotion at last burst its bounds, and the hour that saw his release from immediate action was one that confounded him in the reaction of his spirit.  He suffered without understanding why.  He caught glimpses into himself, into unlit darkness of soul.  The fire that had blistered him and the cold which had frozen him now united in one torturing possession of his mind and heart, and like a fiery steed with ice-shod feet, ranged his being, ran rioting through his blood, trampling the resurging good, dragging ever at the evil.

Out of the subsiding chaos came a clear question.  What had happened?  He had left the valley to go to Cottonwoods.  Why?  It seemed that he had gone to kill a man—­Oldring!  The name riveted his consciousness upon the one man of all men upon earth whom he had wanted to meet.  He had met the rustler.  Venters recalled the smoky haze of the saloon, the dark-visaged men, the huge Oldring.  He saw him step out of the door, a splendid specimen of manhood, a handsome giant with purple-black and sweeping beard.  He remembered