He returned to camp trying to evolve a plan.  As always at that long hour when the afterglow of sunset lingered in the west, Warren plodded to and fro in the gloom.  All night Cameron lay awake thinking.

In the morning, when Warren brought the burros to camp and began preparations for the usual packing, Cameron broke silence.

“Pardner, your story last night made me think.  I want to tell you something about myself.  It’s hard enough to be driven by sorrow for one you’ve loved, as you’ve been driven; but to suffer sleepless and eternal remorse for the ruin of one you’ve loved as I have suffered—­that is hell. . . .  Listen.  In my younger days—­it seems long now, yet it’s not so many years—­I was wild.  I wronged the sweetest and loveliest girl I ever knew.  I went away not dreaming that any disgrace might come to her.  Along about that time I fell into terrible moods—­I changed—­I learned I really loved her.  Then came a letter I should have gotten months before.  It told of her trouble—­importuned me to hurry to save her.  Half frantic with shame and fear, I got a marriage certificate and rushed back to her town.  She was gone—­had been gone for weeks, and her disgrace was known.  Friends warned me to keep out of reach of her father.  I trailed her—­ found her.  I married her.  But too late!...She would not live with me.  She left me—­I followed her west, but never found her.”

Warren leaned forward a little and looked into Cameron’s eyes, as if searching there for the repentance that might make him less deserving of a man’s scorn.

Cameron met the gaze unflinchingly, and again began to speak: 

“You know, of course, how men out here somehow lose old names, old identities.  It won’t surprise you much to learn my name really isn’t Cameron, as I once told you.”

Warren stiffened upright.  It seemed that there might have been a blank, a suspension, between his grave interest and some strange mood to come.

Cameron felt his heart bulge and contract in his breast; all his body grew cold; and it took tremendous effort for him to make his lips form words.

“Warren, I’m the man you’re hunting.  I’m Burton.  I was Nell’s lover!”

The old man rose and towered over Cameron, and then plunged down upon him, and clutched at his throat with terrible stifling hands.  The harsh contact, the pain awakened Cameron to his peril before it was too late.  Desperate fighting saved him from being hurled to the ground and stamped and crushed.  Warren seemed a maddened giant.  There was a reeling, swaying, wrestling struggle before the elder man began to weaken.  The Cameron, buffeted, bloody, half-stunned, panted for speech.

“Warren—­hold on!  Give me—­a minute.  I married Nell.  Didn’t you know that?...I saved the child!”

Cameron felt the shock that vibrated through Warren.  He repeated the words again and again.  As if compelled by some resistless power, Warren released Cameron, and, staggering back, stood with uplifted, shaking hands.  In his face was a horrible darkness.