inquisitive gaze of falcon eyes.  He heard himself repeating:  “Oldring, Bess is alive!  But she’s dead to you,” and he felt himself jerk, and his ears throbbed to the thunder of a gun, and he saw the giant sink slowly to his knees.  Was that only the vitality of him—­that awful light in the eyes—­only the hard-dying life of a tremendously powerful brute?  A broken whisper, strange as death:  “Man—­why—­didn’t—­you wait!  Bess—­was—­” And Oldring plunged face forward, dead.

“I killed him,” cried Venters, in remembering shock.  “But it wasn’t that.  Ah, the look in his eyes and his whisper!”

Herein lay the secret that had clamored to him through all the tumult and stress of his emotions.  What a look in the eyes of a man shot through the heart!  It had been neither hate nor ferocity nor fear of men nor fear of death.  It had been no passionate glinting spirit of a fearless foe, willing shot for shot, life for life, but lacking physical power.  Distinctly recalled now, never to be forgotten, Venters saw in Oldring’s magnificent eyes the rolling of great, glad surprise—­softness—­love!  Then came a shadow and the terrible superhuman striving of his spirit to speak.  Oldring shot through the heart, had fought and forced back death, not for a moment in which to shoot or curse, but to whisper strange words.

What words for a dying man to whisper!  Why had not Venters waited?  For what?  That was no plea for life.  It was regret that there was not a moment of life left in which to speak.  Bess was—­Herein lay renewed torture for Venters.  What had Bess been to Oldring?  The old question, like a specter, stalked from its grave to haunt him.  He had overlooked, he had forgiven, he had loved and he had forgotten; and now, out of the mystery of a dying man’s whisper rose again that perverse, unsatisfied, jealous uncertainty.  Bess had loved that splendid, black-crowned giant—­by her own confession she had loved him; and in Venters’s soul again flamed up the jealous hell.  Then into the clamoring hell burst the shot that had killed Oldring, and it rang in a wild fiendish gladness, a hateful, vengeful joy.  That passed to the memory of the love and light in Oldring’s eyes and the mystery in his whisper.  So the changing, swaying emotions fluctuated in Venters’s heart.

This was the climax of his year of suffering and the crucial struggle of his life.  And when the gray dawn came he rose, a gloomy, almost heartbroken man, but victor over evil passions.  He could not change the past; and, even if he had not loved Bess with all his soul, he had grown into a man who would not change the future he had planned for her.  Only, and once for all, he must know the truth, know the worst, stifle all these insistent doubts and subtle hopes and jealous fancies, and kill the past by knowing truly what Bess had been to Oldring.  For that matter he knew—­he had always known, but he must hear it spoken.  Then, when they had safely gotten out of that wild country to take up a new and an absorbing life, she would forget, she would be happy, and through that, in the years to come, he could not but find life worth living.