Above all he must think. No man could defeat death, but, for a sufficient cause and with dauntless temper of resolution, a man might postpone it. He must win Blossom's battle before he fell. He swayed drunkenly in his saddle and gasped in his effort to breathe as a hooked fish gasps, out of water. It seemed that on his breast lay all the massiveness of the rock-built ranges and at his reason licked fiery tongues of lunacy so that he had constant need to remind himself of his mission. There was some task that he had set out to accomplish--but it wavered into shadowy vagueness. There were scores of mountains to be pushed back and a heavy, sagging thing which he carried in his arms, to be delivered somewhere--before it was too late. His mind wandered and his lips chattered crazy, fever-born things, but to his burden he clung, with a grim survival of instinctive purpose. Sometimes an inarticulate and stifled sound came stertorously from the swollen lips of the weltering body that sagged across the horse's withers--but that was all, and it failed to recall the custodian from the nightmare shades of delirium. But the night was keenly edged with frost and as the plodding mount splashed across shallow fords its hooves broke through a thin rime of ice. That same cold touch laid its restoring influence on Turner Stacy's pounding temples. His eyes saw and recognized the setting of the evening star--and something lucid came back to him. To him the evening star meant Blossom. He remembered now. He was taking a bridegroom to the woman he loved--and the bridegroom must be delivered alive. Jerking himself painfully up in his saddle, he bent his head. "Air ye alive?" he demanded fiercely, but there was no response. He shifted his burden a little and held his ear close. The lips were still breathing, though with broken fitfulness. His fever would return, Bear Cat told himself, in intermittent waves, and he must utilize to the full the available periods of reason. Henderson would bleed to death unless his wounds were promptly staunched. Liquor must be forced down his throat if he were to last to Brother Fulkerson's house with life enough to say "I will." Since the dawn when Bear Cat had given his pledge to Blossom he had always carried a flask in his pocket. He had done so in order that his fight should be one without any sort of evasion of issues: in order that the thirst should be met squarely and that whenever or wherever it attacked him he would have to face and conquer it with the knowledge that drink was at hand. Now he felt for that flask and found that in the mêlée it had been shattered. Rough and almost perpendicular leagues intervened between here and Brother Fulkerson's and there must immediately be some administration of first aid. The instinct of second nature came to Bear Cat's aid as he groped for his bearings.