“The Kid took her away.  The Kid shot me,” and then his voice rose till it flooded the room with terror.  “The Kid shot me and I’m dying.”  He coughed blood to his lips, at which Roy laid him back and stood up.  So there was no mistake, after all, and he had arrived too late.  This was the Kid’s revenge.  This was how he struck.  Lacking courage to face a man’s level eyes, he possessed the foulness to prey upon a woman.  Roy felt a weakening physical sickness sweep over him till his eye fell upon a sodden garment which Helen had removed from her brother’s shoulders and replaced with a dry one.  He snatched it from the floor and in a sudden fury felt it come apart in his hands like wet tissue-paper.

He found himself out in the rain, scanning the trampled soil by light of his lamp, and discerned tracks which the drizzle had not yet erased.  He reasoned mechanically that the two riders could have no great start of him, so strode out beyond the house to see if they had gone farther into the hills.  There were no tracks here, therefore they must have doubled back towards town.  It did not occur to him that they might have left the beaten path and followed down the little creek to the river; but, replacing the light where he had found it, he remounted and lashed his horse into a stiff canter up towards the divide that lay between him and the city.  The story was growing plainer to him, though as yet he could not piece it all together.  Its possibilities stabbed him with such horror that he cried out aloud and beat his steed into faster time with both hands and feet.  To think of those two ruffians fighting over this girl as though she were the spoils of pillage!  He must overtake the Kid—­he would!  The possibility that he might not threw him into such ungovernable mental chaos that he was forced to calm himself.  Men went mad that way.  He could not think of it.  That gasping creature in the road-house spoke all too well of the Bronco’s determination.  And yet, who of those who had known the Kid in the past would dream that his vileness was so utter as this?

Away to the right, hidden among the shadowed hills, his friends rested themselves for the coming battle, waiting impatiently his return, and timing it to the rising sun.  Down in the valley to his left were the two he followed, while he, obsessed and unreasoning, now cursing like a madman, now grim and silent, spurred southward towards town and into the ranks of his enemies.

CHAPTER XXI

THE HAMMER-LOCK

Day was breaking as Glenister came down the mountain.  With the first light he halted to scan the trail, and having no means of knowing that the fresh tracks he found were not those of the two riders he followed, he urged his lathered horse ahead till he became suddenly conscious that he was very tired and had not slept for two days and nights.  The recollection did not reassure the young man, for his body was a weapon which must not fail in the slightest measure now that there was work to do.  Even the unwelcome speculation upon his physical handicap offered relief, however, from the agony which fed upon him whenever he thought of Helen in the gambler’s hands.  Meanwhile, the horse, groaning at his master’s violence, plunged onward towards the roofs of Nome, now growing gray in the first dawn.