Leaving her to pack up some food, Endicott filled the water-bag that hung on the wall and, proceeding to the corral, saddled three of the horses.  Through the open window of the cabin he could see the girl busily engaged in transferring provisions to a sack.  He watched her as she passed and repassed the window intent upon her task.  Never had she seemed so lovable, so unutterably desirable—­and she loved him!  With her own lips she had told him of her love, and with her own lips had placed the seal of love upon his own.  Happiness, like no happiness he had ever known should be his.  And yet—­hovering over him like a pall—­black, ominous, depressing—­was the thing that momentarily threatened to descend and engulf him, to destroy this new-found happiness, haunt him with its diabolical presence, and crush his life—­and hers.

With an effort he roused himself—­squared himself there in the corral for the final battle with himself.  “It is now or never,” he gritted through clenched teeth.  “Now, and alone.  She won’t face the situation squarely.  It is woman’s way, calmy to ignore the issue, to push it aside as the ill of a future day.”

She had said that he was right, and ethically, he knew that he was right—­but the fact of the deed remained.  His hand had sped a soul to its God.

Why?

To save the woman he loved.  No jury on earth would hold him guilty.  He would surrender himself and stand trial.  Then came the memory of what Tex had told him of the machinations of local politics.  He had no wish to contribute his life as campaign material for a county election.  The other course was to run—­to remain, as he now was, a fugitive, if not from justice, at least from the hand of the law.  This course would mean that both must live always within the menace of the shadow—­unless, to save her from this life of haunting fear, he renounced her.

His eyes sought the forbidding sweep of the bad lands, strayed to the sluggish waters of the Missouri, and beyond, where the black buttes of the Judith Range reared their massive shapes in the distance.  Suddenly a mighty urge welled up within him.  He would not renounce her!  She was his!  This was life—­the life that, to him, had been as a sealed book—­the fighting life of the boundless open places.  It was the coward’s part to run.  He had played a man’s part, and he would continue to play a man’s part to the end.  He would fight.  Would identify himself with this West—­become part of it.  Never would he return to the life of the city, which would be to a life of fear.  The world should know that he was right.  If local politics sought to crush him—­to use him as a puppet for their puny machinations, he would smash their crude machine and rebuild the politics of this new land upon principles as clean and rugged as the land itself.  It should be his work!

With the light of a new determination in his eyes, he caught up the bridle-reins of the horses and pushed open the gate of the corral.  As he led the animals out he was once more greeted with a volley of oaths and curses:  “Put them back!  Ye hoss-thief!  I’ll have ye hung!  Them’s mine, I tell ye!”