More than once his imaginative genius had drawn up a picture of that impossible happening.

For it was a truth so inconceivable that he found the absurdity of it a grimly humorous thing.
Even Nada believed he had killed her scoundrelly foster-father.

Yet it was she--herself--who had killed him! And it was Nada whom the law would hang, if the truth was known--and believed.
Frequently he went back over the scenes of that tragic night at Cragg's Ridge when all the happiness in the world seemed to be offering itself to him--the night when Nada was to go with him to the Missioner's, to become his wife, And then--the dark trail--the disheveled girl staggering to him through the starlight, and her sobbing story of how Jed Hawkins had tried to drag her through the forest to Mooney's cabin, and how--at last--she had saved herself by striking him down with a stick which she had caught up out of the darkness.

Would the police believe HIM--an outlaw--if he told the rest of the story ?--how he had gone back to give Jed Hawkins the beating of his life, and had found him dead in the trail, where Nada had struck him down?
Would they believe him if, in a moment of cowardice, he told them that to protect the girl he loved he had fastened the responsibility of the crime upon himself?
No, they would not.

He had made the evidence too complete.