Produced by Darleen Dove, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) BRUCE OF THE CIRCLE A BY HAROLD TITUS Author of "--I Conquered" ILLUSTRATED BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1918 By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY (INCORPORATED) [Illustration: Except for the animal's breathing, the world was very quiet.] CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE WOMAN 1 II. SOME MEN 7 III. THE LODGER NEXT DOOR 17 IV. A REVELATION 31 V. THE CLERGY OF YAVAPAI 46 VI. AT THE CIRCLE A 56 VII. TONGUES WAG 68 VIII. A HEART SPEAKS 84 IX. LYTTON'S NEMESIS 102 X. WHOM GOD HATH JOINED 119 XI. THE STORY OF ABE 131 XII. THE RUNAWAY 147 XIII. THE SCOURGING 163 XIV. THE WOMAN ON HORSEBACK 187 XV. HER LORD AND MASTER 204 XVI. THE MESSAGE ON THE SADDLE 223 XVII. THE END OF THE VIGIL 239 XVIII. THE FIGHT 255 XIX. THE TRAILS UNITE 278 BRUCE OF THE CIRCLE A CHAPTER I THE WOMAN Daylight and the Prescott-Phoenix train were going from Yavapai. Fifty paces from the box of a station a woman stood alone beside the track, bag in hand, watching the three red lights of the observation platform dwindle to a ruby unit far down the clicking ribbons of steel. As she watched, she felt herself becoming lost in the spaciousness, the silence of an Arizona evening. Ann Lytton was a stranger in that strange land. Impressions pelted in upon her--the silhouetted range against the cerise flush of western sky; the valley sweeping outward in all other directions to lose itself in the creeping blue-grays of night; droning voices of men from the station; a sense of her own physical inconsequence; her loneliness ... and, as a background, the insistent vastness of the place.