The result of his reflections was one clear perception: he had made a terrible mess of things from the start. A worthless gambler and murderer without honor or faith or gratitude had been taken out of the proper hands of the law; a man, innocent of crime in this affair at least, now lay dead. And finally the man to whom he had been a benefactor had come within an ace of saddling the guilt of a murder upon his own shoulders.
It was sufficient, one would say, to make Bob Lake swear himself in as a deputy and join the posse in the pursuit of the renegade, Al Rankin. But there was another residue of Bob Lake’s thought, and that residue was the face of Anne Rankin as he had last looked back to her from the head of the car. His memory of her was astonishingly clear. The few attitudes and expres
