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 with the thought that Tom Laylander would have reached and crossed the border of that dark, wild country by now, only to repudiate the feeling the next moment as a traitorous acceptation of his guilt. For she said, and repeated it with obstinate disregard of all argument, proof, circumstance and reason, Tom Laylander was not a guilty man.

Perhaps he had put the money in the robbers' sack; it seemed to be unquestionable that he had gone away with them, as the paper charged. Why he had done this, what circumstance had conspired to force him to do what he had done, she could not understand. It was a shocking tangle which her frantic seeking to penetrate only confused the more. There seemed to be no beginning of reason or motive; there was no end of any sort at all.

She thought the robbers must have taken him as a hostage, unreasonable, unheard of as such hypothesis was. Windy Moore's testimony she wiped out with indignant scorn. The whole experience was like the suffocating black struggle of a dream in which a climax never is reached.

Tom had gone away with the robbers, but Tom was not one of them. How she was to establish his innocence in her own reason, how he was to make it clear against public challenge in his own time, she did not know. Only that Tom had gone toward No Man's Land with the robbers, and that he was an innocent man.

She sat looking out of the south window, the south