At night his mind was active, and this time he had to watch and think and feel beside a dying girl whom he had all but murdered.

A thousand excuses he invented for himself, yet not one made any difference in his act or his self-reproach.
It seemed to him that when night fell black he could see her white face so much more plainly.
"She'll go, presently," he said, "and be out of agony--thank God!" Every little while certainty of her death came to him with a shock; and then he would bend over and lay his ear on her breast.

Her heart still beat.
The early night blackness cleared to the cold starlight.

The horses were not moving, and no sound disturbed the deathly silence of the canyon.
"I'll bury her here," thought Venters, "and let her grave be as much a mystery as her life was." For the girl's few words, the look of her eyes, the prayer, had strangely touched Venters.
"She was only a girl," he soliloquized.

"What was she to Oldring?
Rustlers don't have wives nor sisters nor daughters.