Sam agreed readily enough.  The biting cold of the wind met them at the door.  Rouletta, summoning what strength she could, trudged along at his side.  It did not take them long to canvass the town and to discover that there were no lodgings to be had.  Rouletta halted finally, explaining through teeth that chattered: 

“I—­I’m frozen!  Take me back where there’s a stove—­back to the saloon—­anywhere.  Only do it quickly.”

“Pshaw!  It isn’t cold,” Kirby protested, mildly.

The nature of this remark showed more plainly than anything he had said or done during the evening that the speaker was not himself.  It signified such a dreadful change in him, it marked so surely the extent of his metamorphosis, that Rouletta’s tears came.

“Looks like we’d have to make the best of it and stay awake till morning,” the father went on, dully.

“No, no!  I’m too sick,” the girl sobbed, “and too cold.  Leave me where I can keep warm; then go find the Countess and—­ask her to put me up.”

Returning to their starting-point, Kirby saw to his daughter’s comfort as best he could, after which he wandered out into the night once more.  His intentions were good, but he was not a little out of patience with Letty and still very angry with the man who had affronted her; rage at the insult glowed within his disordered brain and he determined, before he had gone very far, that his first duty was to right that wrong.  Probably the miscreant was somewhere around, or, if not, he would soon make his appearance.  Sam decided to postpone his errand long enough to look through the other drinking-places and to settle the score.

No one, on seeing him thus, would have suspected that he was drunk; he walked straight, his tongue was obedient, and he was master of his physical powers to a deceptive degree; only in his abnormally alert and feverish eyes was there a sign that his brain was completely crazed.

Rouletta waited for a long while, and steadily her condition grew worse.  She became light-headed, and frequently lost herself in a sort of painful doze.  She did not really sleep, however, for her eyes were open and staring; her wits wandered away on nightmare journeys, returning only when the pains became keener.  Her fever was high now; she was nauseated, listless; her chest ached and her breathing troubled her when she was conscious enough to think.  Her surroundings became unreal, too, the faces that appeared and disappeared before her were the faces of dream figures.

Unmindful of his daughter’s need, heedless of the passage of time, Sam Kirby loitered about the saloons and waited patiently for the coming of a certain man.  After a time he bought some chips and sat in a poker game, but he paid less attention to the spots on his cards than to the door through which men came and went.  These latter he eyed with the unblinking stare of a serpent.