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 strong if they were hanging around, throw himself under the car and scramble through to the other side.

From where his car stood it was only a little way to the kitchen of the boarding-train. He would make a dash for that, fight his way in if he had to, and get a drink of water. Already the anticipation of that drink, twelve hours away, intensified the fire of his thirst. Then he would drop out on the other side of the boarding-train, where the world lay open to his feet. Getting away in the dark would not be hard; they would be careful how they crowded him in the dark.

Once clear of them, he would lay a line for Moore's ranch and ask Zora to help him. It would be a cheap thing to do, a despicable resort to the charity of a man whom he had tried to ruin, but it would be his one chance to come out of that scrape alive.

That was the program; he sat there rehearsing it over and over, the presence of the mob a shadow in the background of his thoughts. It was as if he had withdrawn from them a long distance, or to some inaccessible altitude, but that the way of escape would bring him back in peril of them again. Just now he was safe, but there was no way around; to escape he must pass again dangerously near. Down to the last detail of every conceivable exigency he rehearsed that plan. Over and over, with Zora and refuge at the far-away end of it, so far and so uncertain as to seem the fortune for which a man strives under long and cruel stress to see only in a dream.

Outside the sun blazed and the hot wind blew. Dunham's eyes were fevered and blood-lined; his head