Within a hundred yards of his shack, Bud paused. The windows were dark--a fact that made him smile grimly. It indicated that the two were still within or they would not have taken this precaution. And that they were still inside was all he asked. It meant that they must come out--in one hour, two hours, ten hours, twenty hours. It did not much matter when. They must come out of one of two doors. Bud took up a position by the spring-house to the left. From that angle he commanded either door. With rifle cocked he sat down to wait. But waiting was a more difficult business than he anticipated. That was because his thoughts refused to stand still. And yet often enough he had sat on a rock for hours at a time waiting for a buck to pass down a mountain trail--waited stolidly and indifferently for his quarry. He had not then been worried by thought. He had been patient enough. This was all that was necessary now. If Allston had only been in there alone, Bud could have sat where he was a week, indifferent to sleep, indifferent to hunger, indifferent to the weather. Each passing hour then would only have heightened his expectancy. But Roxie was there too. He wondered what the two were doing. There were moments when he thought he caught the sound of their muffled voices--as he had caught them when he lay prone and bound on the floor. Then the moisture started to his forehead and his arm muscles twitched and the tips of his raw fingers began to quiver. He was tempted then to beat down one of those silent, blank doors and force his way in. Only he knew better. He would be shot in his tracks--through the panels most likely. He did not underestimate his man--pink-cheeked, lily-fingered though he might be. Lily fingers could pull a gun trigger quite as easily as any other kind. Furthermore, he had had evidence that Allston could shoot straight. He did not like to remember the night of their first meeting when this stranger had shot the gun out of his hands. Yet it was one of the things he could not forget. He must wait--but what were they doing in there? Holding hands, perhaps. Gawd A’mighty! And he sitting out here in the dark--sitting outside his own home! It was curious, but from the first Bud had never considered as a possibility the fact that Roxie might really care for this stranger. His mind could no more conceive this than that she should not in the end care for himself. Allston was fooling her, that was all, and she was being fooled. One of the traditional old wives’ tales hereabouts was of a country girl ruined by a city chap. Bud had heard it since a boy. He knew of other cases, too, where the villain had not been a city chap; but those stories, though based on sounder evidence, were not as dramatic. They were, perhaps because of this evidence, distinctly commonplace.