"It is a barrier," he answered. "Even to thoughts? Even to friendship?" "Yes." A very strange thing happened in the excited mind of Anne Withero. It seemed to her that Charles Merchant sat, a filmy ghost, beside this tattered fugitive. He was speaking the same words that Andrew spoke, but his voice and his manner were to Andrew Lanning what moonshine is to sunlight. She had been thinking of Charles Merchant as a social asset; she began to think of him now as a possessing force. Anne Withero possessed by Charlie Merchant! "What you have told me," she said, "means more than you may think to me. Have you come all this distance to tell me?" "All this distance to talk?" he said. He seemed to sit back and wonder. "Have I traveled four days?" he went on. "Has Gray Peter died, and have I been under Hal Dozier's rifle only to speak to you?" He suddenly recalled himself. "No, no! I have come to give you a wedding present." He watched her color change. "Are you angry? Is it wrong to give you a present?" "No," she answered in a singular, stifled voice. "It is this watch." It was a large gold watch and a chain of very old make that he put into her hand. "It is for your son," said Andrew. She stood up; he rose instinctively. "When I look at it I'm to remember that you are forgetting me?" A little hush fell upon them. "Are you laughing at me, Anne?" He had never called her by her name before, and yet it came naturally upon his lips. She stood, indeed, with the same smile upon her lips, but her eyes were fixed and looked straight past him. And presently he saw a tear pass slowly down her face. Her hand remained without moving, with the watch in it exactly as he had placed it there. She had not stirred when he slipped without a noise through the window and was instantly swallowed in the rushing of the wind and rain. CHAPTER 33 There was, as Andrew had understood for a long time, a sort of underground world of criminals even here on the mountain desert. Otherwise the criminals could not have existed for even a moment in the face of the organized strength of lawful society. Several times in the course of his wanderings Andrew had come in contact with links of the underground chain, and he learned what every fugitive learns--the safe stopping points in the great circuit of his flight.