A fixed, immutable, hopeless bitterness abided with him.

He had reached the end of his rope.
All the power of his mind and soul were unavailable to turn him back from his fate.
That fate was to become an outlaw in every sense of the term, to be what he was credited with being--that is to say, to embrace evil.

He had never committed a crime.

He wondered now was crime close to him?
He reasoned finally that the desperation of crime had been forced upon him, if not its motive; and that if driven, there was no limit to his possibilities.

He understood now many of the hitherto inexplicable actions of certain noted outlaws--why they had returned to the scene of the crime that had outlawed them; why they took such strangely fatal chances; why life was no more to them than a breath of wind; why they rode straight into the jaws of death to confront wronged men or hunting rangers, vigilantes, to laugh in their very faces.