But Duane did not know surely.

Sellers might have told him.

Duane expected, if not to force it from him at the end, to read it in his eyes.

But the bullet went too unerringly; it locked his lips and fixed his eyes.
After that meeting Duane lay long at the ranchhouse of a friend, and when he recovered from the wound Sellers had given him he started with two horses and a pack for the lonely gorge on the Nueces.

There he had been hidden for months, a prey to remorse, a dreamer, a victim of phantoms.
It took work for him to find subsistence in that rocky fastness.