An’ you an’ Ben will know I am Jim Lacy! … Oh, if only I could have kept it secret, so you’d never have known I was bad! An’, oh—there’ll never be any one to tell you I cain’t be bad no more!”

Thus Nevada mourned to himself while the shadow face in the fire softened and glowed with sweetness and understanding. It was an hour when Nevada’s love mounted to the greatness of sacrifice, when he cast forever from him any hope of possession, when he realized all that remained was the glory and the dream, and the changed soul which must be true to the girl who had loved him and believed in him.

Beside that first camp fire Nevada’s courage failed. He had never, until now, realized the significance of that moment when Hettie and he, without knowing how it had come to pass, found themselves in each other’s arms. What might have been! But that, too, had only been a dream. Still, Nevada knew he had dreamed it, believed in it, surrendered to it. And some day he might have buried the past, even his name, and grasped the happiness Hettie’s arms had promised. Ben would have joyfully accepted him as a brother. But in hiding his real name, in living this character Nevada, could he have been true to the soul Ben and Hettie had uplifted in him? Nevada realized that he could no longer have lived a lie. And though he would not have cared so much about Ben, he had not wanted Hettie to learn that he had been Jim Lacy, notorious from Lineville across the desert wastes of Nevada clear to Tombstone.

“Reckon it’s better so,” muttered Nevada to the listening camp fire. “If only Hettie never learns aboot the real me!”

The loss of Hettie was insupportable. He had been happy without realizing it. On the steps of friendship and love and faith he had climbed out of hell. He had been transformed. Never could he go back, never minimize the bloody act through which he had saved his friend from the treachery of a ruthless and evil man. That act, as well, had saved the Blaines and the Ides from ruin, and no doubt Ina and Hettie from worse. For that crafty devil, Setter, had laid his plans well.

Nevada bowed his bare head over his camp fire, and a hard sob racked him.

“Shore—it’s losin’ her—that kills me!” he ground out between his teeth. “I cain’t—bear it.”

When he crawled into his blankets at midnight it was only because the conflict within him had exhausted his strength. Sleep mercifully brought him oblivion. But with the cold dawn his ordeal returned, and the knowledge that it would always abide with him. The agony was that he could not be happy without Hettie Ide’s love—without sight of her, without her smile, her touch. He wanted to seek some hidden covert, like a crippled animal, and die. He wanted to plunge into the old raw life of the border, dealing death and meeting death among those lawless men who had ruined him.

But he could not make an end to it all, in any way. The infernal paradox was that in thought of Ben’s happiness, which he had made, there was an ecstasy as great as the agony of his own loss. Furthermore, Hettie’s love, her embraces, her faith had lifted him to some incredible height and fettered him there, forever to fight for the something she had created in himself. He owed himself a debt greater than that which he had owed Ben. Not a debt to love, but to faith! Hettie had made him believe in himself—in that newborn self which seemed now so all-compelling and so inscrutable.

“Baldy, I’ve shore got a fight on my hands,” he said to his horse, as he threw on the saddle. “We’ve got to hit the back trails. We’ve got to eat an’ sleep an’ find some place where it’s safe to hide. Maybe, after a long while, we can cross over the desert to Arizona an’ find honest work. But, by Heaven! if I have to hide all my life, an’ be Jim Lacy to the bloody end, I’ll be true to this thing in my heart—to the name Ben Ide gave me—Nevada—the name an’ the man Hettie Ide believed in!”

Nevada traveled far that day, winding along the cattle trails up the valleys and over the passes.