As he forded the Little MacLeod he was cursing Max.
"Damn him," he muttered. "Are there not enough cheap law breakers? Why must he seek to do my work for me?"
So began Drennen's quest for three men and one girl with grey eyes and a sweet body that was like a song, a girl who had awakened the old, dormant good in him and then had driven him so deep into the black chasm that no light entered where he was.
CHAPTER XIX
THE LONG TRAIL
Each day that passed set its seal deeper into the heart and soul of David Drennen. His eyes grew harder, his mouth sterner. There came into his face the lines of his relentless hatred. Sinister and morose and implacable, biding his time and nursing his purpose, he grew to be more than ever before the lone wolf. His lips which had long ago forgotten how to smile were constantly set in an ugly snarl. His purpose possessed him so completely that it had grown into an obsession. It became little less than maniacal.
He seemed a man whose emotions were gone, swallowed up in a cool determination. There came no flush to his face, no quickened beating of his heart when the trail seemed hot before him, no evidence of disappointment when again and again he learned that he had followed a false scent and that he was no nearer his prey than he had been at the beginning. He was still unhurrying as when he had ridden out of MacLeod's Settlement. He would find what he sought to-day or ten years from to-day. His vengeance would lose nothing through delay. On the other hand, it would fall the heavier. Of late he had become endowed with an infinite patience.
The last thought in his brain at night was the first thought when he woke. It was unchanging day after day, week after week, month after month. If he must wait even longer it would remain unaltered year after year.
His eyes had grown to be keener than knives, restless, watchful, bright with suspicion. Nowhere throughout the breadth of the land did he have a friend. What he felt for others was paid back to him in his own currency: distrust, dislike, silence.