"I'm sorry I troubled you, Miss Benham," he said. He essayed to turn, staggered, looked vacantly around the room, his lips in a queerly cold half-smile, and then without uttering a sound pitched forward, one shoulder against the door jamb, and slid slowly to his knees, where he rested, his head sinking limply to his chest. He heard the girl cry out sharply and he raised his head with an effort and smiled reassuringly at her, and when he felt her hands on his arm, trying to lift him, he laughed aloud in self-derision and got to his feet, hanging to the door jamb. "I'm sorry, Miss Benham," he mumbled. "I lost some blood, I suppose. Rotten luck, isn't it. I shouldn't have stopped." He turned to go, lurched forward and would have fallen out of the door had not the girl seized and steadied him. He did not resist when she dragged him into the room and closed the door, but he waved her away when she tried to take his arm and lead him toward the kitchen where, she insisted, she would prepare a stimulant and food for him. He tottered after her, tall and gaunt, his big, lithe figure strangely slack, his head rocking, the room whirling around him. He had held to the record and the rifle; the latter by the muzzle, dragging it after him, the record under his arm. But his marvelous constitution, a result of his clean living and outdoor life, responded quickly to the stimulation of food and hot drinks, and in half an hour he got up, still a little weak, but with some color in his cheeks, and shame-facedly thanked the girl. He realized now, that he should not have come here; the past few hours loomed in his thoughts like a wild nightmare in which he had lost his sense of proportion, yielding to the elemental passions that had been aroused in his long, sleepless struggle, making him act upon impulses that he would have frowned contemptuously away in a normal frame of mind. "I've been nearly crazy, I think," he said to the girl with a wan smile of self-accusation. "I want you to forget what I said." "What happened at Manti?" she demanded, ignoring his words. He laughed at the recollection, tucking his rifle under his arm, preparatory to leaving. "I went after the record. I got it. There was a fight. But I got away." "But the fire!" "I was forced to smash a lamp in the courthouse. The wick fell into the oil, and I couldn't delay to--" "Was anybody hurt--besides you?" "Braman's dead." The girl gasped and shrank from him, and he saw that she believed he had killed the banker, and he was about to deny the crime when Agatha's voice shrilled through the doorway: "There are some men coming, Rosalind!" And then, vindictively: "I presume they are desperadoes--too!" "Deputies!" said Trevison. The girl clasped her hands over her breast in dismay, which changed to terror when she saw Trevison stiffen and leap toward the door. She was afraid for him, horrified over this second lawless deed, dumb with doubt and indecision--and she didn't want them to catch him!