BRUCE

OF THE CIRCLE A

BY HAROLD TITUS

Author of "—I Conquered"

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON
SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1918
By SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY
(INCORPORATED)

Except for the animal's breathing, the world was very quiet.

CONTENTS

BRUCE OF THE CIRCLE A

CHAPTER I

THE WOMAN

Daylight and the Prescott-Ph[oe]nix train were going from Yavapai. Fifty paces from the box of a station a woman stood alone beside the track, bag in hand, watching the three red lights of the observation platform dwindle to a ruby unit far down the clicking ribbons of steel. As she watched, she felt herself becoming lost in the spaciousness, the silence of an Arizona evening.

Ann Lytton was a stranger in that strange land. Impressions pelted in upon her—the silhouetted range against the cerise flush of western sky; the valley sweeping outward in all other directions to lose itself in the creeping blue-grays of night; droning voices of men from the station; a sense of her own physical inconsequence; her loneliness ... and, as a background, the insistent vastness of the place.

Then, out of the silence from somewhere not far off, came a flat, dead crash, the report of a firearm. The woman was acutely conscious that the voices in the station had broken short with an abruptness which alarmed her. The other sound—the shot—had touched fear in her, too, and the knowledge that it had nipped the attention of the talking men sent a cool thrill down her limbs.

A man emerged from the depot and his voice broke in,

"Wonder where that—"

He stopped short and the woman divined the reason. She strained to catch the thrum of running hoofs, knowing intuitively that the man, also, had ceased speaking to listen. She was conscious that she trembled.

Another man stepped into the open and spoke, hurriedly, but so low that Ann could not hear; the first replied in the same manner, giving a sense of stealth, of furtiveness that seemed to the woman portentous. She took a step forward, frightened at she knew not what, wanting to run to the men just because she was afraid and they were human beings. She checked herself, though, and forced reason.

This was nonsense! She laid it on her nerves. They were ragged after the suspense and the long journey, the dread and hopes. A shot, a