“Listen. I want you to trust me because I'm the one who knows what's best. I wouldn't lie an' I wouldn't say so if I didn't know shore. I swear Dale will back me up. But he can't be here for some days. An' thet gang has got to be bluffed. You ought to see this. I reckon you've been quick in savvyin' Western ways. I couldn't pay you no higher compliment, Bo Rayner.... Now will you tell me?” “Yes, I will,” replied Bo, with the blaze leaping to her eyes. “Oh, Bo--please don't--please don't. Wait!” implored Helen. “Bo--it's between you an' me,” said Carmichael. “Tom, I'll tell you,” whispered Bo. “It was a lowdown, cowardly trick.... Roy was surrounded--and shot from behind Beasley--by that four-flush Riggs!” CHAPTER XIX The memory of a woman had ruined Milt Dale's peace, had confounded his philosophy of self-sufficient, lonely happiness in the solitude of the wilds, had forced him to come face to face with his soul and the fatal significance of life. When he realized his defeat, that things were not as they seemed, that there was no joy for him in the coming of spring, that he had been blind in his free, sensorial, Indian relation to existence, he fell into an inexplicably strange state, a despondency, a gloom as deep as the silence of his home. Dale reflected that the stronger an animal, the keener its nerves, the higher its intelligence, the greater must be its suffering under restraint or injury. He thought of himself as a high order of animal whose great physical need was action, and now the incentive to action seemed dead. He grew lax. He did not want to move. He performed his diminishing duties under compulsion. He watched for spring as a liberation, but not that he could leave the valley. He hated the cold, he grew weary of wind and snow; he imagined the warm sun, the park once more green with grass and bright with daisies, the return of birds and squirrels and deer to heir old haunts, would be the means whereby he could break this spell upon him. Then he might gradually return to past contentment, though it would never be the same. But spring, coming early to Paradise Park, brought a fever to Dale's blood--a fire of unutterable longing. It was good, perhaps, that this was so, because he seemed driven to work, climb, tramp, and keep ceaselessly on the move from dawn till dark. Action strengthened his lax muscles and kept him from those motionless, senseless hours of brooding. He at least need not be ashamed of longing for that which could never be his--the sweetness of a woman--a home full of light, joy, hope, the meaning and beauty of children. But those dark moods were sinkings into a pit of hell.