And with the spoken words Neale’s heart contracted.  He knew that he lied to himself.  If she ever cared for another man, that would be the end of Warren Neale.  But then, he was ended, anyhow.  Jealousy, strange, new, horrible, added to Neale’s other burdens, finished him.  He had the manhood to try to fight selfishness, but he had failed to subdue it; and he had nothing left to fight his consuming love and hatred of life and terrible loneliness and that fierce thing—­jealousy.  He had saved Allie Lee!  Why had he given her up?  He had stained his hands with blood for her sake.  And that awful moment came back to him when, maddened by the sting of a bullet, he had gloried in the cracking of Durade’s bones, in the ghastly terror and fear of death upon the Spaniard’s face, in the feel of the knife-blade as he forced Durade to stab himself.  Always Neale had been haunted by this final scene of his evil life in the construction camps.  A somber and spectral shape, intangible, gloomy-faced, often, attended him in the shadow.  He justified his deed, for Durade would have killed Allison Lee.  But that fact did not prevent the haunting shape, the stir in the dark air, the nameless step upon Neale’s trail.

And jealousy, stronger than all except fear, wore Neale out of his exaltation, out of his dream, out of his old disposition to work.  He could persist in courage if not in joy.  But jealous longing would destroy him—­he felt that.  It was so powerful, so wonderful that it brought back to him words and movements which until then he had been unable to recall.

And he lived over the past.  Much still baffled him, yet gradually more and more of what had happened became clear specifically in his memory.  He could not think from the present back over the past.  He had to ponder the other way.  One day, leaning on his sledge, Neale’s torturing self, morbid, inquisitive, growing by what it fed on, whispered another question to his memory.

“What were some of the last words she spoke to me?” And there, limned white on the dark background of his mind, the answer appeared, “Neale, I forgive you!”

He recalled her face, the tragic eyes, the outstretched arms.

“Forgive me!  For what?” Neale muttered, dazed and troubled.  He dropped his sledge and remained standing there, though the noon whistle called the gang to dinner.  Looking out across the hot, smoky, arid desert he saw again that scene where he had appealed to Allison Lee.

The picture was etched out vividly, and again he lived through those big moments of emotion.

The room full of men—­Lee’s cold acceptance of fact, his thanks, his offer, his questions, his refusal—­General Lodge’s earnest solicitation—­the rapid exchange of passionate words between them—­ the query put to Neale and his answer—­the sudden appearance of Allie, shocking his heart with rapture—­her sweet, wild words—­and so the end!  How vivid now—­how like flashes of lightning in his mind!