Bear Cat lay for a moment, sick, dizzy and motionless while a groan, which never reached his lips, spasmodically shook his chest and shoulders. Succeeding that paralyzed instant, a fever of unspeakable fury surged over him and while all the rest of his body stretched unstirring, his arms slipped forward and the muzzle of his rifle crept over the ledge of rock. But that, too, was only a response to instinct and the thumb halted in the act of cocking the hammer. His vengeance called not only for satisfaction but for glutting. Henderson must die face to face with him, not by the stealth of ambuscade, but by open violence to be administered with bare hands--realizing the cause of his punishment--dying by inches! But as he was on the point of rising to confront them, something arrested him: the stupor of a man whose mind and heart had trusted so implicitly that they could not yet fully credit even the full demonstration of his eyes. This must, despite all its certainty, be some hallucination--some wide-eyed nightmare! While the spell of his stunned heart held him in the thrall of inaction, Henderson and Blossom parted with slow reluctance and took up their opposite direction of journey. Left alone, like a man sitting, shaken and demoralized, upon the broken débris of a wrecked universe, Turner stared ahead with a dull incredulity. But inaction was foreign to his nature and after a while he rose unsteadily to his feet. He turned and started at a swift stride which broke presently into a dog-trot along the way Henderson had taken; then he hesitated, halted and wheeled in his tracks. "No!" he exclaimed. "No, by God, ef I meets up with _him_ the way I feels now, I'll kill him afore he has ther chanst ter speak with me. I kain't govern myself. I aims ter let _her_ tell hit to me her own self!" So he altered his direction and went plunging westward. A short route through broken rock and tangled brush enabled him to cut ahead of Blossom's course so that, turning an abrupt angle in the trail, the girl found him standing before her with clenched hands and a face so set and pale that she started back. It seemed to her that, instead of himself, it was his ghost which confronted her. With a slow and stifled outcry, at the apparition, she carried her hands to her face, then broke into convulsive sobs. "I didn't aim ter eavesdrop, Blossom," said Turner, his sternness wavering before her tears. "But I seed ye givin' yore lips ter Jerry Henderson back thar. Hit seems ter me like I kin almost discern the stain of thet kiss soilin' em now. I reckon I ought rightfully ter hev speech with him fust--but I knowed I'd kill him ef I did--an' so I held my hand twell I'd done seed _you_." They were both trembling, and the girl's hands came slowly away from a face pitifully agitated. Her voice was a whisper. "Ye mustn't censure me, Turney," she huskily protested. "I'm plighted--ter _him_."