“No; but that's another story. Meantime this fellow's father died, leaving the boy he, himself, had started on the wrong road, entirely out of his will. The boy went to the devil--and he's still there.” Saxon paused and looked once more at the tiny wavering smoke column, hardly visible now. “He's over yonder hiding away from the light of day under the bluffs by the fire that sends that curl of smoke up through the crevices in the rock, an outlaw thief.” Saxon gazed long at the landscape beyond the Walnut. When he spoke again, it was with an effort. “Professor, this outlaw got a hold on me once when I was drunk, drunk by his making. It would do no good to tell you about that. You could n't help me, nor harm him. You'll trust me in this?” A picture of Dennie down in the Kickapoo Corral, with the flickering firelight on her rippling hair, the weird, shadowy woodland, and the old Indian legend all came back to the young man now, though why he could not say. “I certainly would never bring harm to you nor yours,” he said kindly. “I can't inform on the scoundrel. I can only watch him. The woman he was in love with years ago, who would n't stand for his wild ways--that's the gray-haired woman at Pigeon Place. Her life's been one long tragedy, though she is not forty yet.” The anguish on the old man's face was pitiful as he spoke. “She has a reason of her own for living here, and she is the soul of courage. On the night of the Fenneben accident, I was out her way--yes, running away from Bond Saxon. I knew if I stayed in town, I'd get drunk on a bottle left at my door. So I tore out in the rain and the dark to fight it out with the devil inside of me. And out at Pigeon Place I run onto this fiend. When I ordered him back to his hiding place, he vowed he'd get Fenneben and put him in the river. There's one or two human things about him still. One is his fear of little children, and one is his love for that woman. He really did adore her years ago. I tracked home after him, and you know the rest. He put up some story to the Dean to entice him out there.” He hesitated, then ceased to speak. “Why the Dean?” Burgess asked. “Because Lloyd Fenneben's the man she loved years ago, and her folks wouldn't let her marry,” Bond Saxon said sadly. Burgess felt as if the limestone ridge was giving way beneath him. “Where is she now?” “She's gone, nobody knows where. I hope to heaven she will never come back,” the old man replied. “And it was she who saved Dr. Fenneben's life? Does he know who she is?” “No, no. She's never let him know, and if she does n't want him to know, whose business is it to tell him?” Saxon urged. “I have hung about and protected her when she never knew I was near. But when I'm drunk, I'm an idiot and my mind is bent against her. I'd die to save her, and yet I may kill her some day when I don't know it.” Bond Saxon's head was drooping pitifully low.