Now Beauty Stanton realized that she had been left alone in an abandoned tent of an abandoned camp—­to die.  She became more conscious then of dull physical agony.  But neither fear of death nor thought of pain occupied her mind.  That suddenly awoke to remorse.  With the slow ebbing of her life evil had passed out.  If she had been given a choice between the salvation of her soul and to have Neale with her in her last moments, to tell him the truth, to beg his forgiveness, to die in his arms, she would have chosen the latter.  Would not some trooper come before she died, some one to whom she could intrust a message?  Some grave-digger!  For the great U. P. R. buried the dead it left in its bloody tracks!

With strange, numb hands Stanton searched the pockets of her dressing-gown, to find, at length, a little account-book with pencil attached.  Then, with stiffened fingers, but acute mind, she began to write to Neale.  As she wrote into each word went something of the pang, the remorse, the sorrow, the love she felt; and when that letter was ended she laid the little book on her breast and knew for the first time in many years—­peace.

She endured the physical agony; she did not cry out, or complain, or repent, or pray.  Most of the spiritual emotion and life left in her had gone into the letter.  Memory called up only the last moments of her life—­when she saw Ancliffe die; when she folded innocent Allie Lee to the breast that had always yearned for a child; when Neale in his monstrous stupidity had misunderstood her; when he had struck her before the grinning crowd, and in burning words branded her with the one name unpardonable to her class; when at the climax of a morbid and all-consuming hate, a hate of the ruined woman whose body and mind had absorbed the vile dregs, the dark fire and poison, of lustful men, she had inhumanly given Allie Lee to the man she had believed the wildest, most depraved, and most dangerous brute in all Benton; when this Larry King, by some strange fatality, becoming as great as he was wild, had stalked out to meet her like some red and terrible death.

She remembered now that strange, icy gloom and shudder she had always felt in the presence of the cowboy.  Within her vitals now was the same cold, deadly, sickening sensation, and it was death.  Always she had anticipated it, but vaguely, unrealizingly.

Larry King had lifted the burden of her life.  She would have been glad—­if only Neale had understood her!  That was her last wavering conscious thought.

Now she drifted from human consciousness to the instinctive physical struggle of the animal to live, and that was not strong.  There came a moment, the last, between life and death, when Beauty Stanton’s soul lingered on the threshold of its lonely and eternal pilgrimage, and then drifted across into the gray shadows, into the unknown, out to the great beyond.

Casey leaned on his spade while he wiped the sweat from his brow and regarded his ally McDermott.  Between them yawned a grave they had been digging and near at hand lay a long, quiet form wrapped in old canvas.