And still Ben Blair had not stirred. Slowly, as the other had approached, the big blue eyes had darkened until they seemed almost brown. Involuntarily the massive chin had moved forward; but that was all. On the surface he was as calm as a lake on a windless night; but beneath,--God! what a tempest was raging! Each one of those minutes he waited so impassively marked the rush of a year's memories. Human hate, primal instinct all but uncontrollable, throbbed in his accelerated pulse-beats. Like the continuous shifting scenes in a panorama, the incidents of his life in which this man had played a part appeared mockingly before his mind's eye. Plainly, as though in his physical ear, he heard the shuffle of an uncertain hand upon a latch; he saw a figure with bloodshot eyes lurch into a rude floorless room, saw it approach a bunk whereon lay a sick woman, his mother; heard the swift passage of angry words, words which had branded themselves into his memory forever. Once more he was on all fours, scurrying for his life toward the dark opening of a protecting kennel. As plainly as though the memory were of yesterday, he gazed into the blazing mouth of a furnace, felt its scorching breath on his cheek. Swiftly the changing scenes danced before his eyes. A rifle-shot, real almost as though he could smell the burning powder, sounded in his brain. Within the circle of light from a kerosene lamp a great figure sank in a heap to a ranch house floor. Against a background of unbroken white a trail of red blotches ended in the mutely pathetic figure of a prostrate dying horse--a noble thoroughbred. What varied horrors seethed in the watcher's brain, crowded each other, recurred and again recurred! How the long sinewy fingers itched to clutch that throat above the red neckerchief! He could see the man's face now, as, ignorant of danger so close, he was passing by fifty feet to the left, looking to neither side, doggedly heading toward the pass. With the first motion since the figure had appeared, the hand of the watcher tightened on the rifle, raised it until its black muzzle peeped over the elevation of snow. A pair of steady blue eyes gazed down the long barrel, brought the sights in line with a spot between the shoulders and the waist of the unsuspecting man, the trigger-finger tightened, almost-- A preventing something, something not primal in the youth, gripped him, held him for a second motionless. To kill a man from an ambush, even such a one as this without giving him a chance--no, he could not quite do that. But to take him by the throat with his bare hands, and then slowly, slowly--