“By God!  I’ll make of Allie Lee the thing I am!  The thing he struck —­the thing he named!”

The woman in Beauty Stanton ceased to be.  All that breathed, in that hour, was what men had made her.  Revenge, only a word!  Murder, nothing!  Life, an implacable, inexplicable, impossible flux and reflux of human passion!  Reason, intelligence, nobility, love, womanhood, motherhood—­all the heritage of her sex—­had been warped by false and abnormal and terrible strains upon her physical and emotional life.  No tigress, no cannibal, no savage, no man, no living creature except a woman of grace who knew how far she had fallen could have been capable of Beauty Stanton’s deadly and immutable passion to destroy.  Thus life and nature avenged her.  Her hate was immeasurable.  She who could have walked naked and smiling down the streets of Benton or out upon the barren desert to die for the man she loved had in her the inconceivable and mysterious passion of the fallen woman; she could become a flame, a scourge, a fatal wind, a devastation.  She was fire to man; to her own sex, ice.  Stanton reached her house and entered.  Festivities in honor of the last night of Benton were already riotously in order.  She placed herself well back in the shadow and watched the wide door.

“The first man who enters I’ll give him this key!” she hissed.

She was unsteady on her feet.  All her frame quivered.  The lights in the hall seemed to have a reddish tinge.  She watched.  Several men passed out.  Then a tall, stalking form appeared, entering.

A ball of fire in Stanton’s breast leaped and burst.  She had recognized in that entering form the wildest, the most violent and the most dangerous man in Benton—­Larry Red King.

Stanton stepped forward and for the first time in the cowboy’s presence she did not experience that singular chill of gloom which he was wont to inspire in her.

Her eyes gloated over King.  Tall, lean, graceful, easy, with his flushed ruddy face and his flashing blue eyes and the upstanding red hair, he looked exactly what he was—­a handsome red devil, fearing no man or thing, hell-bent in his cool, reckless wildness.

He appeared to be half-drunk.  Stanton was trained to read the faces of men who entered there; and what she saw in King’s added the last and crowning throb of joy to her hate.  If she had been given her pick of the devils in Benton she would have selected this stalking, gun-packing cowboy.

“Larry, I’ve a new girl here,” she said.  “Come.”

“Evenin’, Miss—­Stanton,” he drawled.  He puffed slightly, after the manner of men under the influence of liquor, and a wicked, boyish, heated smile crossed his face.

She led him easily.  But his heavy gun bumped against her, giving her little cold shudders.  The passage opened into a wide room, which in turn opened into her dancing-hall.  She saw strange, eager, dark faces among the men present, but in her excitement she did not note them particularly.  She led Larry across the wide room, up a stairway to another hall, and down this to the corner of an intersecting passageway.