"Jim Taggart's got Injun blood in him, you know," muttered Gallup uneasily to Cliff Shipton ... as though that might explain anything. Even to such as Young Gallup, a man of whose humanity little was to be said, explanations were logical requirements. For Jim Taggart was at his evil worst. With cruelly hard fist he had knocked the little Mexican down; before Joe could get to his feet he booted him; when Joe stood, tottering, Taggart knocked him down again, jarring the quivering flame of life within him. And only at that did Jim Taggart, a man of no imagination but of colossal brutality, count that he was beginning. Then it was that Joe cried out; that his scream pierced through the night's stillness; that he pleaded with Taggart, saying: "This time, I tell you the true! I tell you ever'thing...." "You're damned right you will," shouted Taggart, beside himself with his long baffled rage. "When I get good and ready to listen. And I'm not listening now, you Mexico pup! First you go through hell, and then I'll know that you tell the truth! Fool with me, would you; with me, Jim Taggart? You----" Then Taggart began his third degree, listening to neither Joe's pleadings nor yet to the voice of Young Gallup. The four men were in Bruce Standing's old cabin; the door was wide open, since here, so far from the world, in the dense outer fringes of Timber-Wolf's isolated wilderness kingdom, no man of them ... saving Joe alone, who had now given up hope ... had a thought of another human eye to see; Shipton, at a curt word from Taggart, had piled the mouth of the fireplace full of dead-wood, for the sole sake of light, and it was hot in the small room. Taggart had bound the Mexican's hands behind him, drawing the thong so tight that it cut cruelly into the flesh.... Taggart had knocked Joe down and had booted him to his heart's content; the swarthy face had turned a sick white. Taggart's eyes were glowing like coals raked out from hell's own sulphurous fires; he was sure of the outcome, sure of swift success, and yet now, in pure fiendishness, more absorbed in his own unleashed deviltry than in the mere matter of raw gold, which he counted securely his as soon as he was ready for it. Whether or not Indian blood ran in his veins, elemental savagery did. Mexicali Joe, unable to rise, or in fear for his life if he stirred, lay on the floor, his eyes dilated with terror, staring up into Taggart's convulsed face. "I tell you the true!" he screamed. "This time, before God, I tell----" "Shut up, you greaser-dog!" Taggart, a man of full measure, kicked him, and under the driving pain inflicted by that heavy boot, Joe's eyes flickered and closed, and Joe's brain staggered upon the dizzy black verge of unconsciousness. Taggart saw and understood and pitched a dipperful of water in his face. Joe gasped faintly. Taggart stepped to the fireplace, and snatched out a blazing pine branch.