No doubt the other two Chinamen had joined Li Choo in his hiding-place, wherever it was.

Why had the Chinamen come?
What were they after?
It did not matter for the moment.

What he wanted was Louise, his bad child-wife, who had broken from her cage and flown from him.

Where would she go?
Where, but to Slow Down Ranch?
Where, but to her lover, the circus-rider, the boy with the head of brown curls, with the ring on his finger and the Cupid mouth! Where would she go but to the man with whom she had spent the night on the prairie! Now he believed altogether that she was guilty, that everybody had conspired to deceive him, that he was in a net of dark deception.

Even the two Chinamen, mysteriously coming and going, had laughed at him like two heathen gods, and had vanished suddenly like heathen gods.
A weakness came over him, and the skin of his face became creased and clammy like that of a drowned man; his limbs trembled, so desperate was his passion.