During all the warmth of that day Ben Blair slept on, as a child sleeps, as sleep the very aged; and although the bearded man had freed himself from the gag at last, he did not again make a sound.  Too miserable himself to sleep, he lay staring at the other.  Gradually through the haze of impotent anger a realization of his position came to him.  He could not avoid the issue.  To be sure, he was still alive; but what of the future?  A host of possibilities flashed into his mind, but in every one there faced him a single termination.  By no process of reasoning could he escape the inevitable end; and despite the chilliness of the air a sweat broke out over him.  Contrition for what he had done he could not feel—­long ago he had passed even the possibility of that; but fear, deadly and absorbing fear, had him in its clutch.  The passing of the years, years full of lawlessness and violence, had left him the same man whom bartender “Mick” had terrorized in the long ago; and for the first time in his wretched life, personal death—­not of another but of himself—­looked at him with steady eyes, and he could not return the gaze.  All he could do was to wait, and think—­and thoughts were madness.  Again and again, knowing what the result would be, but seeking merely a diversion, he struggled at the straps until he was breathless; but relentless as time one picture kept recurring to his brain.  In it was a rope, a stout rope, dangling from something he could not distinctly recognize; but what he could see, and see plainly, was a figure of a man, a bearded man—­himself—­at its end.  The body swayed back and forth as he had once seen that of a “rustler” whom a group of cowboys had left hanging to the scraggly branch of a scrub-oak; as a pendulum marks time, measuring the velocity of the prairie wind.

With each recurrence of the vision the perspiration broke out over the man anew, the sunburned forehead paled.  This was what it was coming to; he could not escape it.  If ever purpose was unmistakably written on a human face, it had been on the face of the man who lay sleeping so near, the man who had trailed him like a tiger and caught him when he thought he was safe.  From another, there might still be hope; but from this one, Jennie Blair’s son—­The vision of a woman lying white and motionless on the coarse blankets of a bunk, of a small boy with wonderfully clear blue eyes pounding harmlessly at the legs of the man looking down; the sound of a childish voice, accusing, menacing, ringing out over all, “You’ve killed her!  You’ve killed her!”—­this like a chasm stood between them, and could never be crossed.  Clasped together, the long nervous fingers, a gentleman’s fingers still, twined and gripped each other.  No, there was no hope.  Better that the hands he had felt about his throat in the morning had done their work.  He shut his eyes.  A hot wave of anger, anger against himself, swept all other thoughts before it.  Why, having gotten