The stare of the wounded man flickered. With a moan of pain he bent to the neck of his horse and remained there a moment, and then, dropping his revolver and resting both quivering hands on the pommel of his saddle, he drew himself partially erect. His eyes were rolling upward, his purple lips moved as if to speak, but his vocal organs seemed to have lost their power. Holding to his pommel with his left hand, he raised his right and partially extended it towards Dwight, but he had not the strength to sustain its weight, and with another moan, a frothing at the mouth, Dan Willis toppled from his horse and went to the ground, the animal breaking away in alarm and running down the road. Quickly dismounting, Carson bent over the dying man. “Dan, were you offering me your hand?” he asked, tenderly. But there was no response. The mountaineer was dead. There he lay, a pint whiskey flask nearly empty of its contents protruding from his shirt. Carson looked up and about him. The sky had never seemed clearer, the forest never so beautifully lush and green, so full of sylvan recesses and the gladsome songs of birds. Higher and more majestic never had the mountains seemed to tower into God's infinite blue. And yet here at his feet lay the remains of one who had been created in the image of his Maker, as lifeless as the clod from which he had sprung. All _this_--and Carson's horse nibbling with bitted mouth the short grass which grew about. There were no fires of satisfied revenge at which the spiritually chilled young man could warm himself. Regret steeped in the vat of remorse filled his young soul. Seating himself at the side of the road, he remained there a long time calmly laying his plans. Of course, knowing the law as he knew it, he would give himself up to the sheriff. Then with a start and a shock of horror he thought of his mother. Dr. Stone's warning now loomed up before him as if written in letters of fire. Yes, this--this, of all things, would kill her! Knowing her nature, nothing that could happen to him would be more fatal. Not even his own death by violence would hold such terrors for her sensitive, imaginative temperament, which exaggerated every ill or evil that beset his path. After all, he grimly asked himself, which way did his real duty lie? Obedience to the law he reverenced demanded that he throw himself upon its slow and creaking routine, and yet was there not a higher tribunal? By what right should the legal machinery of his or any other country require the life of a stricken woman that the majesty of its forms might be upheld and the justice or injustice to an outlaw who had persistently hounded him be formally passed upon?