Saul Chadron was at breakfast next morning when Maggie the cook appeared in the dining-room and announced a visitor for the señor boss. Maggie’s eyes were bulging, and she did a great deal of pantomime with her shapely shoulders to express her combined fright, disgust, and indignation.

Chadron looked up from his ham and eggs, with a considerable portion of the eggs on the blade of his knife, handle-down in one fist, his fork standing like a lightning rod in the other, and asked her who the man was and what he wanted at that hour of the day. Chadron was eating by lamplight, and alone, according to his thrifty custom of slipping up on the day before it was awake, as if in the hope of surprising it at a vast disadvantage to itself, after his way of handling men and things.

“Es un extranjero,” replied Maggie, forgetting her English in her excitement.

“Talk white man, you old sow!” Chadron growled.

“He ees a es-trenger, I do not knowed to heem.”

“Tell him to go to the barn and wait, I’ll be out there in a minute.”

Chadron had returned to his meal after ordering her to send his visitor to the barn. He was swabbing his knife in the fold of a pancake when Maggie made that frightful, shivering exclamation and jumped aside out of the door. Now he looked up to reprove her, and met the smoky eyes of Mark Thorn peering in from the kitchen.

“What’re you doin’ around here, you old—come in—shut that door! Git him some breakfast,” he ordered, turning to Maggie.

Maggie hung back a moment, until Thorn had come into the room, then she shot into the kitchen like a cat through a fence, and slammed the door behind her.

“What in the hell do you mean by comin’ around here?” Chadron demanded angrily. “Didn’t I tell you never to come here? you blink-eyed old snag-shin!”

“You told me,” Thorn admitted, putting his rifle down across a chair, drawing another to the table, and seating himself in readiness for the coming meal.

“Then what’d you sneak—”

“News,” said Thorn, in his brief way.

“Which news?” Chadron brightened hopefully, his implements, clamped in his hairy fists, inviting the first bolt from the heavens.

“I got him last night.”

“You got—him?” Chadron lifted himself from his chair on his bent legs in the excitement of the news.

“And I’m through with this job. I’ve come to cash in, and quit.”

“The hell you say!”

“I’m gittin’ too old for this kind of work. That feller chased me around till my tongue was hangin’ out so fur I stepped on it. I tell you he was—”

“How did you do it?”

Thorn looked at him with a scowl. “Well, I never used a club on a man yit,” he said.

“Where did it happen at?”

“Up there at his place. He’d been chasin’ me for two days, and when he went back—after grub, I reckon—I doubled on him. Just as he went in the door I got him. I left him with his damn feet stickin’ out like a shoemaker’s sign.”

“How fur was you off from him, Mark?”

“Fifty yards, more ’r less.”

“Did you go over to him to see if he was finished, or just creased?”

“I never creased a man in my life!” Thorn was indignant over the imputation.

Chadron shook his head, in doubt, in discredit, in gloomy disbelief.

“Go and see, and settle it yourself, then,” Thorn proposed, in surly humor.

Chadron had suspended his breakfast, as if the news had come between him and his appetite. He sat in a study, his big hand curved round his cup, his gaze on the cloth. At that juncture Maggie came in with a platter of eggs and ham, which she put down before Mark Thorn skittishly, ready to jump at the slightest hostile start. Thorn began to eat, as calmly as if there was not a stain on his crippled soul.

Unlike the meal of canned oysters which he had consumed as Chadron’s guest not many days before, Thorn was not welcomed to this by friendly words and urging to take off the limit. Chadron sat watching him, in divided attention and with dark face, as if he turned troubles over in his mind.

Thorn cleaned the platter in front of him, and looked round hungrily, like a cat that has half-satisfied its stomach on a stolen bird. He said nothing, only he reached his foul hand across the table and took up the dish containing the remnant of Chadron’s breakfast. This he soon cleared up, when he rasped the back of his hand across his harsh mustache, like a vulture preening its filthy plumage, and leaned back with a full-stomached sigh.

“He makes six,” said he, looking hard at Chadron.

“Huh!” Chadron grunted, noncommittally.

“I want the money, down on the nail, a thousand for the job. I’m through.”

“I’ll have to look into it. I ain’t payin’ for anything sight ’nseen,” Chadron told him, starting out of his speculative wanderings.

“Money down, on the nail,” repeated Thorn, as if he had not heard. His old cap was hovering over his long hair, its flaps down like the wings of a brooding hen. There were clinging bits of broken sage on it, and burrs, which it had gathered in his skulking through the brush.

“I’ll send a man up the river right away, and find out about this last one,” Chadron told him, nodding slowly. “If you’ve got Macdonald—”

“If hell’s got fire in it!”

“If you’ve got him, I’ll put something to the figure agreed on between you and me. The other fellers you’ve knocked over don’t count.”

“I’ll hang around—”

“Not here! You’ll not hang around here, I tell you!” Chadron cut him off harshly, fairly bristling. “Snake along out of here, and don’t let anybody see you. I’ll meet you at the hotel in the morning.”

“Gittin’ peticlar of your company, ain’t you?” sneered Thorn.

“You’re not company—you’re business,” Chadron told him, with stern and reproving eyes.

He crossed over to the fire and stood near Thorn, who was slouching low in his chair, his long legs stretched straight, his heels crossed before the low ashy fire that smoldered in the chimney. For a little while Chadron stood looking down on his hired scourge, a knitting of displeasure in his face, as if he waited for him to break the silence. Thorn continued his dark reverie undisturbed, it seemed, his pipestem between his fingers.

“Yes, it was his damn hired hand!” said Chadron, with profound disgust.

“That’s what I heard you say,” acknowledged Thorn, not moving his head.

“You knew it all the time; you was tryin’ to work me for the money, so you could light out!”

“I didn’t even know he had a hired hand!” Thorn drew in his legs, straightened his back, and came with considerable spirit to the defense of his evil intent.

“Well, he ain’t got none now, but he’s alive and kickin’. You’ve bungled on this job worse than an old woman. I didn’t fetch you in here to clean out hired hands and kids; we can shake a blanket and scare that kind out of the country!”

“Well, put him in at fifty then, if he was only a hired hand,” said Thorn, willing to oblige.

“When you go ahead and do what you agreed to, then we’ll talk money, and not a red till then.”

Thorn got up, unlimbering slowly, and laid the pipe on the mantel-shelf. He seemed unmoved, indifferent; apathetic as a toothless old lion. After a little silence he shook his head.

“I’m done, I tell you,” he said querulously, as if raising the question crossed him. “Pay me for that many, and call it square.”

“Bring in Macdonald,” Chadron demanded in firm tones.

“I ain’t a-goin’ to touch him! If I keep on after that man he’ll git me—it’s on the cards, I can see it in the dark.”

“Yes, you’re lost your nerve, you old wildcat!” There was a taunt in Chadron’s voice, a sneer.

Thorn turned on him, a savage, smothered noise in his throat.

“You can say that because you owe me money, but you know it’s a damn lie! If you didn’t owe me money, I’d make you swaller it with hot lead!”

“You’re talkin’ a little too free for a man of your trade, Mark.” While Chadron’s tone was tolerant, even friendly, there was an undercurrent of warning, even threat, in his words.

“You’re the feller that’s lettin’ his gab outrun his gumption. How many does that make for me, talkin’ about nerve, how many? Do you know?”

“I don’t care how many, it lacks one of bein’ enough to suit me.”

“Twenty-eight, and I’ve got ’em down in m’ book and I can prove it!”

“Make it twenty-nine, and then quit if you want to.”

“Maybe I will.” Thorn leaned forward a little, a glitter in his smoky eyes.

Chadron fell back, his face growing pale. His hand was on his weapon, his eyes noting narrowly every move Thorn made.

“If you ever sling a gun on me, you old devil, it’ll be—”

“I ain’t a-goin’ to sling no gun on you as long as you owe me money. I ain’t a-goin’ to cut the bottom out of m’ own money-poke, Chad; you don’t need to swivel up in your hide, you ain’t marked for twenty-nine.”

“Well, don’t throw out any more hints like that; I don’t like that kind of a joke.”

“No, I wouldn’t touch a hair of your head,” Thorn ran on, following a vein which seemed to amuse him, for he smiled, a horrible, face-drawing contortion of a smile, “for if you and me ever had a fallin’ out over money I might git so hard up I couldn’t travel, and one of them sheriff fellers might slip up on me.”

“What’s all this fool gab got to do with business?” Chadron was impatient; he looked at his watch.

“Go on and tell him then,”—Chadron spoke with a dare in his words, and derision—“that’ll be easy money, and it won’t call for any nerve. But you don’t need to be plannin’ any speech from the gallus—you’ll never go that fur if you try to double-cross me!”

“I ain’t aimin’ to double-cross no man, but you can call it that if it suits you. You can call it whatever you purty damn well care to—I’m done!”

Chadron made no reply to that. He was pulling on his great gloves, frowning savagely, as if he meant to close the matter with what he had said, and go.

“Do I git any money, or don’t I?” Thorn asked, sharply.

“When you bring in that wolf’s tail.”

“I ain’t a-goin’ to touch that feller, I tell you, Chad. That man means bad luck to me—I can read it in the cards.”

“Maybe you call that kind of skulkin’ livin’ up to your big name?” Chadron spoke in derision, playing on the vanity which he knew to be as much a part of that old murderer’s life as the blood of his merciless heart.

“I’ve got glory enough,” said Thorn, satisfaction in his voice; “what I want right now’s money.”

“Earn it before you collect it.”

“Twenty-eight ’d fill a purty fair book, countin’ in what I could tell about the men I’ve had dealin’s with,” Thorn reflected, as to himself, leaning against the mantel, frowning down at the floor with bent head.

“Talk till you’re empty, you old fool, and who’ll believe you? Huh! you couldn’t git yourself hung if you was to try!” Chadron’s dark face was blacker for the spreading flood of resentful blood; he pointed with his heavy quirt at Thorn, as if to impress him with a sense of the smallness of his wickedness, which men would not credit against the cattlemen’s word, even if he should publish it abroad. “You’ll never walk onto the scaffold, no matter how hard you try—there’ll be somebody around to head you off and give you a shorter cut than that, I’m here to tell you!”

“Huh!” said Thorn, still keeping his thoughtful pose.

Man-killing is a trade that reacts differently on those who follow it, according to their depth and nature. It makes black devils of some who were once civil, smiling, wholesome men, whether the mischance of life-taking has fallen to them in their duty to society or in outlawed deeds. It plunges some into dark taciturnity and brooding coldness, as if they had eaten of some root which blunted them to all common relish of life.

There was but one side left to that depraved man’s mind; his bloody, base life had smothered the rest under the growing heap of his horrible deeds. Thorn had killed twenty-eight human beings for hire, of whom he had tally, but there was one to be included of whom he had not taken count—himself.

As he stood here against the chimney-shelf he was only the outside husk of a man. His soul had been judged already, and burned out of him by the unholy passion which he had indulged. He was as simple in his garrulous chatter of glory and distinction as a half-fool. His warped mind ran only on the spectacular end that he had planned for himself, and the speech from the gallows that was to be the black, damning seal at the end of his atrocious life’s record.

Thorn looked up from his study; he shook his head decisively.

Chadron had taken up his quirt from the little round table where the hotel register lay. He turned now toward the outer door, as if in earnest about going his way and leaving Mark Thorn to follow his own path, no matter to what consequences it might lead.

“If you’re square enough to settle up with me for this job,” said Thorn, “and pay me five hundred for what I’ve done, I’ll leave your name out when I come to make that little speech.”

Chadron turned on him with a sneer. “You seem to have your hangin’ all cut and dried, but you’ll never go ten miles outside of this reservation if you don’t turn around and put that job through. You’ll never hang—you ain’t cut out in the hangin’ style.”

“I tell you I will!” protested Thorn hotly. “I can see it in the cards.”

“Well, you’d better shuffle ’em ag’in.”

“I know what kind of a day it’s goin’ to be, and I know just adzackly how I’ll look when I hold up m’ hands for them fellers to keep still. Shucks! you can’t tell me; I’ve seen that day a thousand times. It’ll be early in the mornin’, and the sun bright—”

“Grab your gun!” Chadron whispered.

“Just let it stay where it is, Thorn,” advised the stranger, his quick hand on his own weapon before Thorn could grasp what it was all about, believing, as he did, in the safety of the reservation’s neutral ground. “Macdonald is my name; I’ve been looking for you.” The stranger came on as he spoke.

He was but a few feet away from Thorn, and the old man-killer had his revolvers buckled around him in their accustomed place, while his death-spreading rifle stood near his hand, leaning its muzzle against the chimney-jamb. Thorn seemed to be measuring all the chances which he had left to him in that bold surprise, and to conclude in the same second that they were not worth taking.

Macdonald had not drawn his revolver. His hand was on the butt of it, and his eye held Thorn with a challenge that the old slayer was in no mind to accept.

Thorn was not a close-fighting man. He never had killed one of his kind in a face-to-face battle in all his bloody days. At the bottom he was a coward, as his skulking deeds attested, and in that moment he knew that he stood before his master. Slowly he lifted his long arms above his head, without a word, and stood in the posture of complete surrender.

Nearer the outer door stood Chadron, to whom Macdonald seemed to give little attention, as if not counting him in the game. The big cattleman was “white to the gills,” as his kind expressed that state. Macdonald unbuckled Thorn’s belt and hung his revolvers over his arm.

“I knowed you’d git me, Macdonald,” the old scoundrel said.

Macdonald, haggard and dusty, and grim as the last day that old Mark Thorn had pictured for himself, pushed his prisoner away from the chimney, out of reach of the rifle, and indicated that he was to march for the open door, through which the tables in the dining-room could be seen. At Macdonald’s coming Chadron had thrown his hand to his revolver, where he still held it, as if undecided how far to go.

“Keep your gun where it is, Chadron,” Macdonald advised. “This isn’t my day for you. Clear out of here—quick!”

Chadron backed toward the front door, his hand still dubiously on his revolver. Still suspicious, his face as white as it would have been in death, he reached back with his free hand to open the door.

“I told you he’d git me,” nodded Thorn, with something near to exultation in the vindication of his reading of the cards. “I give you a chance—no man’s money ain’t a-goin’ to shut my mouth now!”

“Drop that gun!”

A moment Chadron’s arm hung stiffly in that half-finished movement, while his eyes gave defiance. He had not bent before any man in many a year of growing power. But there was no other way; it was either bend or break, and the break would be beyond repair.

Chadron’s fingers were damp with sudden sweat as he unclasped them from the pistol-butt and let the weapon fall; sweat was on his forehead, and a heaviness on his chest as if a man sat on him. He felt backwards through the open door with one foot, like an old man distrustful of his limbs, and steadied himself with his shoulder against the jamb, for there was a trembling in his knees. He knew that he had saved himself from the drop into eternal inconsequence by the shading of a second, for there was death in dusty Alan Macdonald’s face. The escape left Chadron shaken, like a man who has held himself away from death by his finger-ends at the lip of a ledge.

“I knowed you’d git me, Macdonald,” Thorn repeated. “You don’t need no handcuffs nor nothin’ for me. I’ll go along with you as gentle as a fish.”

Thorn said that he had one in the hotel stable. “But don’t you try to take me too fur, Macdonald,” he advised. “Chadron he’ll ride a streak to git his men together and try to take me away from you—I could see it in his eye when he went out of that door.”

Macdonald knew that Thorn had read Chadron’s intentions right. He nodded, to let him know that he understood the cattleman’s motives.

“Well, don’t you run me off to no private rope party, neither, Macdonald, for I can tell you things that many a man’d pay me big money to keep my mouth shut on.”

“You’ll have a chance, Thorn.”

“But I want it done in the right way, so’s I’ll git the credit and the fame.”

Macdonald was surprised to find this man, whose infamous career had branded him as the arch-monster of modern times, so vain and garrulous. He could account for it by no other hypothesis than that much killing had indurated the warped mind of the slayer until the taking of a human life was to him a commonplace. He was not capable of remorse, any more than he had been disposed to pity. He was not a man, only the blighted and cursed husk of a man, indeed, but doubly dangerous for his irresponsibility, for his atrophied small understanding.

Once home with Thorn, he could raise a posse to guard him until the sheriff could be summoned. Even then there was no certainty that the prisoner ever would see the inside of the Meander jail, for the sheriff of that county was nothing more than one of Chadron’s cowboys, elevated to office to serve the unrighteous desires of the men who had put him there.

But Macdonald was determined that there should be no private rope party for Thorn, neither at the hands of the prisoner’s employers nor at those of the outraged settlers. Thorn must be brought to trial publicly, and the story of his employment, which he appeared ready enough to tell for the “glory” in it, must be told in a manner that would establish its value.

The cruelly inhuman tale of his contracts and killings, his engagements and rewards, must be sown by the newspapers far and wide. Out of this dark phase of their oppression their deliverance must rise.

Chance Dalton, foreman of Alamito Ranch, was in charge of the expedition that rode late that afternoon against Macdonald’s homestead to liberate Mark Thorn, and close his mouth in the cattlemen’s effective way upon the bloody secrets which he might in vainglorious boast reveal. Chadron had promised rewards for the successful outcome of the venture, and Chance Dalton rode with his three picked men in a sportsman’s heat.

He was going out on a hunt for game such as he had run down more than once before in his many years under Chadron’s hand. It was better sport than running down wolves or mountain lions, for there was the superior intelligence of the game to be considered. No man knew what turn the ingenuity of desperation might give the human mind. The hunted might go out in one last splendid blaze of courage, or he might cringe and beg, with white face and rolling eyes. In the case of Macdonald, Dalton anticipated something unusual. He had tasted that unaccountable homesteader’s spirit in the past.

The men who came behind him were cowboys from the Texas Panhandle, lean and tough as the dried beef of their native plains. It was the most formidable force, not in numbers, but in proficiency, that ever had proceeded against Macdonald, and the most determined.

Chadron himself had bent to the small office of spy to learn Macdonald’s intention in reference to his prisoner. From a sheltered thicket in the foothills the cattleman had watched the homesteader through his field glasses, making certain that he was returning Thorn to the scene of his latest crimes, instead of risking the long road to the Meander jail.

Chadron knew that Macdonald would defend the prisoner’s life with his own, even against his neighbors. Macdonald would be as eager to have Thorn tell the story of his transactions with the Drovers’ Association as they would be to have it shut off. The realization of this threw Chadron into a state which he described to himself as the “fantods.” Another, with a more extensive and less picturesque vocabulary, would have said that the president of the Drovers’ Association was in a condition of panic.

So he had despatched his men on this silencing errand, and now, as the sun was dipping over the hills, all red with the presage of a frosty night, Chance Dalton and his men came riding in sight of Macdonald’s little nest of buildings fronting the road by the river.

Macdonald had secured his prisoner with ropes, for there was no compartment in his little house, built of boards from the mountain sawmill, strong enough to confine a man, much less a slippery one like Mark Thorn. The slayer had lapsed into his native taciturnity shortly after beginning the trip from the reservation to Macdonald’s homestead, and now he lay on the floor trussed up like a hog for market, looking blackly at Macdonald. Macdonald was considering the night ride to Meander with his prisoner that he had planned, with the intention of proceeding from there to Cheyenne and lodging him in jail. He believed there might be a better chance of holding him for trial there, and some slight hope of justice.

A hail from the gate startled Macdonald. It was the custom of the homesteaders in that country, carried with them from the hills of Missouri and Arkansas, to sit in their saddles at a neighbor’s gate and call him to the door with a long “hello-o-oh!” It was the password of friendship in that raw land; a cowboy never had been known to stoop to its use. Cowboys rode up to a homesteader’s door when they had anything to say to him, and hammered on it with their guns.

Macdonald went to the door and opened it unhesitatingly. The horseman at the gate was a stranger to him. He wore a little derby hat, such as the cowpunchers despised, and the trappings of his horse proclaimed him as a newcomer to that country. He inquired loudly of the road to Fort Shakie, and Macdonald shouted back the necessary directions, moving a step away from his open door.

The stranger put his hand to his ear and leaned over.

“Which?” said he.

At that sound of that distinctly-cowboy vernacular, Macdonald sprang back to regain the shelter of his walls, sensing too late the trap that the cowboy’s unguarded word had betrayed. Chance Dalton at one corner of the rude bungalow, his next best man at the other, had been waiting for the decoy at the gate to draw Macdonald away from his door. Now, as the homesteader leaped back in sudden alarm, they closed in on him with their revolvers drawn.

There was the sound of a third man trying the back door at the same time, and the disguised cowboy at the gate slung his weapon out and sent a wild shot into the lintel above Macdonald’s head. The two of them on the ground had him at a disadvantage which it would have been fatal to dispute, and Macdonald, valuing a future chance more than a present hopeless struggle, flung his hands out in a gesture of emptiness and surrender.

“Put ’em up—high!” Dalton ordered.

Dalton watched him keenly as the three in that picture before the door stood keyed to such tension as the human intelligence seldom is called upon to withstand. Macdonald stood with one foot on the low threshold, the door swinging half open at his back. He was bareheaded, his rough, fair hair in wisps on temples and forehead. Dalton’s teeth were showing between his bearded lips, and his quick eyes were scowling, but he held his companion back with a command of his free hand.

Macdonald lifted his hands slowly, holding them little above a level with his shoulders.

“Give up your prisoner, Macdonald, and we’ll deal square with you,” Dalton said.

“Go in and take him,” offered Macdonald, stepping aside out of the door.

“Go ahead of us, and put ’em up higher!” Dalton made a little expressive flourish with his gun, evidently distrustful of the homesteader’s quick hand, even at his present disadvantage.

The man at the back door was using the ax from Macdonald’s wood pile, as the sound of splintering timber told. Between three fires, Macdonald felt his chance stretching to the breaking point, for he had no faith at all in Chance Dalton’s word. They had come to get him, and it looked now as if they had won.

“You’ve played hell now, ain’t you? lettin’ ’em git the drop on you that way!” he said to Macdonald, angrily. “They’ll swing—”

“Hand over that gun, Macdonald,” Dalton demanded. They were standing near him, one on either hand, both leveling their guns at his head. Macdonald could see the one at the back door of his little two-roomed bungalow through the hole that he had chopped.

“I don’t hand my gun to any man; if you want it, come and take it,” Macdonald said, feeling that the end was rushing upon him, and wondering what it would be. A bullet was better than a rope, which Chadron had publicly boasted he had laid up for him. There was a long chance if Dalton reached for that gun—a long and desperate chance.

The man at the back door was shouting something, his gun thrust through the hole. Dalton made a cross-reach with his left hand for Macdonald’s revolver. On the other side the cowboy was watching his comrade’s gun pointing through the kitchen door; Macdonald could see the whites of his eyes as he turned them.

“Don’t shoot in here! we’ve got ’em,” he called.

His shifted eye told Macdonald that he was trusting to Dalton, and Dalton at that moment was leaning forward with a strain, cautiously, his hand near Macdonald’s holster.

Macdonald brought his lifted arms down, like a swimmer making a mighty stroke, with all the steam behind them that he could raise. His back-handed blow struck the cowboy in the face; Macdonald felt the flame of his shot as it spurted past his forehead. The other arm fell short of the nimbler and more watchful Dalton, but the duck that he made to escape it broke the drop that he had held over Macdonald.

Macdonald’s hand flashed up with his own gun. He drove a disabling shot through Dalton’s wrist as the ranch foreman was coming up to fire, and kicked the gun that he dropped out of reach of his other hand. The cowboy who had caught Macdonald’s desperate blow had staggered back against the foot of the bed and fallen. Now he had regained himself, and was crouching behind the bed, trying to cover himself, and from there as he shrank down he fired. The next flash he sprawled forward with hands outstretched across the blanket, as if he had fallen on his knees to pray.

Macdonald caught Dalton by the shirt collar as he went scrambling on his knees after the revolver. Dalton was splashing blood from his shattered wrist over the room, but he was senseless to pain and blind to danger. He sprang at Macdonald, cursing and striking.

“Keep off, Dalton! I don’t want to kill you, man!” Macdonald warned.

Macdonald did not see what took place there, for it was over by the time he had struck Dalton into a limp quiet heap at his feet by a blow with his revolver across the eyes. But there had been a shot at the door, and Macdonald had heard the man from the back come running around the side of the house. There were more shots, but all done before Macdonald could leap to the door.

There, through the smoke of many quick shots that drifted into the open door, he saw the two cowboys fallen with outflung arms. In the road a few rods distant Mark Thorn was mounting one of Chadron’s horses. The old outlaw flung himself flat along the horse’s neck, and presented little of his vital parts as a target. As he galloped away Macdonald fired, but apparently did not hit. In a moment Thorn rode down the river-bank and out of sight.

Macdonald stood a little while in the middle of the disordered room after re-entering the house, a feeling of great silence about him, and a numbness in his ears and over his senses. It was a sensation such as he had experienced once after standing for hours under the spell of Niagara. Something seemed to have been silenced in the world.

He was troubled over the outcome of that treacherous assault. He felt that the shadow of the resultant tragedy was already stretching away from there like the penumbra of an eclipse which must soon engulf those homesteads on the river, and exact a terrible, blasting toll.

Dalton was huddled there, his life wasting through the wound in his wrist, blood on his face from the blow that had laid him still. The dead man across the bed remained as he had fallen, his arms stretched out in empty supplication. There was a pathos in the fellow’s pose that touched Macdonald with a pity which he knew to be undeserved. He had not meant to take his life away in that hasty shot, but since it had happened so, he knew that it had been his own deliverance.

Macdonald stripped the garment back and looked at Dalton’s hurt. There would be another one to take toll for in the cattlemen’s list unless the drain of blood could be checked at once. Dalton moved, opening his eyes.

It seemed unlikely that Dalton ever would sling a gun with that member again, if he should be so lucky, indeed, as to come through with his life. The bone was shattered, the hand hung limp, like a broken wing. Dalton sat up, yielding his arm to his enemy’s ministrations, as silent and ungracious as a dog. In a little while Macdonald had done all that he could do, and with a hand under the hollow of Dalton’s arm he lifted him to his feet.

“Can you ride?” he asked. Dalton did not reply. He looked at the figure on the bed, and stood turning his eyes around the room in the manner of one stunned, and completely confounded by the failure of a scheme counted infallible.

“You made a botch of this job, Dalton,” Macdonald said. “The rest of your crowd’s outside where Thorn dropped them—he snatched your gun from the floor and killed both of them.”

Dalton went weakly to the door, where he stood a moment, steadying himself with a hand on the jamb. Macdonald eased him from there to the gate, and brought the horses which the gang had hidden among the willows.

“Tell Chadron to send a wagon up here after these dead men,” Macdonald said, leading a horse to the gate.

He helped the still silent Dalton into the saddle, where he sat weakly. The man seemed to be debating something to say to this unaccountably fortunate nester, who came untouched through all their attempts upon his life. But whatever it was that he cogitated he kept to himself, only turning his eyes back toward the house, where his two men lay on the ground. The face of one was turned upward. In the draining light of the spent day it looked as white as innocence.

“That will be no friend of yours, Dalton. Get out of this!”

He cut Dalton’s horse a sharp blow. The beast bounded away with a start that almost unseated its dizzy rider; the two free animals galloped after it. Chance Dalton was on his way to Chadron with his burden of disgrace and disastrous news. It seemed a question to Macdonald, as he watched him weaving in the saddle as the gloom closed around him and shut him from sight, whether he ever would reach the ranchhouse to recount his story, whatever version of the tragedy he had planned.

Tom Lassiter drew up before Macdonald’s gate while the dust of Dalton’s going was still hanging there. The gaunt old homesteader with the cloud of sorrows in his eyes said that he had been on his way over to see what had become of Macdonald in his lone hunt for Mark Thorn. He had heard the shooting, and the sound had hurried him forward.

Macdonald told him what had happened, and took him in to see the wreckage left after that sudden storm. Tom shook his head as he stood in the yard looking down at the two dead men.

“Hell’s a-goin’ to pop now!” he said.

“I think you’ve said the word, Tom,” Macdonald admitted. “They’ll come back on me hard for this.”

“You’ll never have to stand up to ’em alone another time, I’ll give you a guarantee on that, Mac.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Macdonald replied, but wearily, and with no warmth or faith in his words.

“And they let that old scorpeen loose to skulk and kill ag’in!”

“Yes, he got away.”

“They sure did oncork a hornet’s nest when they come here this time, though, they sure did!” Tom stood in the door, looking into the darkening room and at the figure sprawled across the bed. “He-ell’s a-goin’ to pop now!” he said again, in slow words scarcely above his breath.

He turned his head searchingly, as if he expected to see the cloud of it already lowering out of the night.

Nola Chadron had been a guest overnight at the post. She had come the afternoon before, bright as a bubble, and Frances had met her with a welcome as warm as if there never had been a shadow between them.

Women can do such things so much better than men. Balzac said they could murder under the cover of a kiss. Perhaps somebody else said it ahead of him; certainly a great many of us have thought it after. There is not one out of the whole world of them but is capable of covering the fire of lies in her heart with the rose leaves of her smiles.

Nola had come into Frances’ room to do her hair, and employ her busy tongue while she plied the brush. She was a pretty bit of a figure in her fancily-worked Japanese kimono and red Turkish slippers—harem slippers, she called them, and thought it deliciously wicked to wear them—as she sat shaking back her bright hair like a giver of sunbeams.

“Oh, you soldiers!” said Nola, shaking her brush at Frances’ placid back, “you get up so early and you dress so fast that you’re always ahead of everybody else.”

Frances turned to her, a smile for her childish complaint.

“You’ll get into our soldiering ways in time, Nola. We get up early and live in a hurry, I suppose, because a soldier’s life is traditionally uncertain, and he wants to make the most of his time.”

“And love and ride away,” said Nola, feigning a sigh.

“Do they?” asked Frances, not interested, turning to the window again.

“Of course,” said Nola, positively.

that’s an old border song, did you ever hear it?”

“No, I never did.”

“It’s about the Texas rangers, though, and not real soldiers like you folks. A cavalryman’s wife wrote it; I’ve got it in a book.”

“Maybe they do that way in Texas, Nola.”

“How?”

“Love and ride away, as you said. I never heard of any of them doing it, except figuratively, in the regular army.”

Nola suspended her brushing and looked at Frances curiously, a deeper color rising and spreading in her animated face.

“Oh, you little goose!” said she.

“Mostly they hang around and make trouble for people and fools of themselves,” said Frances, in half-thoughtful vein, her back to her visitor, who had stopped brushing now, and was winding, a comb in her mouth.

Nola held her quick hand at the half-finished coil of hair while she looked narrowly at the outline of Frances’ form against the window. A little squint of perplexity was in her eyes, and furrows in her smooth forehead. Presently she finished the coil with dextrous turn, and held it with outspread hand while she reached to secure it with the comb.

“I can’t make you out sometimes, Frances, you’re so funny,” she declared. “I’m afraid to talk to you half the time”—which was in no part true—“you’re so nunnish and severe.”

“Oh!” said Frances, fully discounting the declaration.

“Well, I am half afraid of you sometimes,” Nola persisted. “I draw my hand back from touching you when you’ve got one of your soaring fits on you and walk along like you couldn’t see common mortals and cowmen’s daughters.”

“Well, everybody isn’t like you, Nola; there are some who treat me like a child.”

Frances was thinking of her father and Major King, both of whom had continued to overlook and ignore her declaration of severance from her plighted word. The colonel had brushed it aside with rough hand and sharp word; the major had come penitent and in suppliance. But both of them were determined to marry her according to schedule, with no weight to her solemn denial.

“Mothers do that, right along,” Nola nodded.

“Here’s somebody else up early”—Frances held the curtain aside as she spoke, and leaned a little to see—“here’s your father, just turning in.”

“The señor boss?” said Nola, hurrying to the window.

The maid had let Chadron in by the time Nola opened the door of the room, and there she stood leaning and listening, her little head out in the hall, as if afraid to run to meet trouble. Chadron’s big voice came up to them.

“It’s all right,” Nola nodded to Frances, who stood at her elbow, “he wants to see the colonel.”

Frances had heard the cattleman’s loud demand for instant audience. Now the maid was explaining in temporizing tones.

“The colonel he’s busy with military matters this early in the day, sir, and nobody ever disturbs him. He don’t see nobody but the officers. If you’ll step in and wait—”

“The officers can wait!” Chadron said, in loud, assertive voice that made the servant shiver. “Where’s he at?”

Frances could see in her lively imagination the frightened maid’s gesture toward the colonel’s office door. Now the girl’s feet sounded along the hall in hasty retreat as Chadron laid his hearty knock against the colonel’s panels.

“I’ll hurry”—Nola dashed into her own room, finishing from the door—“I want to catch him before he goes and find out what’s wrong.”

Frances went below to see about breakfast for her tardy guest, a little fluttering of excitement in her own breast. She wondered what could have brought the cattleman to the post so early—he must have left long before dawn—and in such haste to see her father, all buckled about with his arms. She trusted that it might not be that Alan Macdonald was involved in it, for it was her constant thought to hope well for that bold young man who had heaved the homesteaders’ world to his shoulders and stood straining, untrusted and uncheered, under its weight.

True, he had not died in defense of her glove, but she had forgiven him in her heart for that. A reasonable man would not have imperiled his life for such a trifle, and a reasonable woman would not have expected it. There was a great deal more sense in Alan Macdonald living for his life’s purpose than in dying for a foolish little glove. So she said.

Major King, in attendance upon his chief, had opened the door to Saul Chadron at the colonel’s frowning nod. Without waiting for the password into the mysteries of that chamber, Chadron had entered, his heavy quirt in hand, gauntlets to his elbows, dusty boots to his knees. Colonel Landcraft stood at his desk to receive him, his brows bent in a disfavoring frown.

“I’ve busted in on you, colonel, because my business is business, not a mess of reportin’ and signin’ up on nothing, like your fool army doin’s.” Chadron clamped with clicking spurs across the severe bare floor as he made this announcement, the frown of his displeasure in having been stopped at the door still dark on his face.

“I’m waiting your pleasure, sir,” Colonel Landcraft returned, stiffly.

“I want twenty-five troopers and a cannon, and somebody that knows how to use it, and I want ’em right away!”

Chadron gave the order with a hotness about him, and an impatience not to be denied.

“Sir!” said Colonel Landcraft, throwing his bony shoulders back, his little blue eyes growing very cold and unfriendly.

Colonel Landcraft swallowed like an eagle gorging a fish. His face grew red, he clamped his jaw, and held his mouth shut. It took him some little time to suppress his flooding emotions, and his voice trembled even when he ventured to trust himself to speak.

“That’s a matter for your civil authorities, sir; I have nothing to do with it at all.”

“You ain’t got—nothing—?” Chadron’s amazement seemed to overcome him. He stopped, his eyes big, his mouth open; he turned his head from side to side in dumbfounded way, as if to find another to bear witness to this incredible thing.

“I tell you they’re threatenin’ my property, and the property of my neighbors!” protested Chadron, stunned, it seemed, that he should have to stop for details and explanations. “We’ve got millions invested—if them fellers gobbles up our land we’re ruined!”

“Sir, I can sympathize with you in your unfortunate business, but if I had millions of my own at stake under similar conditions I would be powerless to employ, on my own initiative, the forces of the United States army to drive those brigands away.”

Chadron looked at him hard, his hat on his head, where it had remained all the time, his eyes staring in unspeakable surprise.

“The hell you would!” said he.

“He’s got as many as a hundred men organized, maybe twice that”—Chadron multiplied on the basis of damage that his men had suffered—“and my men tell me he’s drillin’ ’em like soldiers.”

“I’m not surprised to hear that,” nodded the colonel; “that man Macdonald’s got it in him to do that, and fight like the devil, too.”

“A gang of ’em killed three of my men a couple of days ago when I sent ’em up there to his shack to investigate a little matter, and Macdonald shot my foreman up so bad I guess he’ll die. I tell you, man, it’s a case for troopers!”

“What has the sheriff and the rest of you done to restore order?”

“I took twenty of my men up there yisterday, and a bunch of Sam Hatcher’s from acrosst the river was to join us and smoke that wolf out of his hole and hang his damn hide on his cussed bob-wire fence. But hell! they was ditched in around that shack of his’n, I tell you, gentlemen, and he peppered us so hard we had to streak out of there. I left two of my men, and Hatcher’s crew couldn’t come over to help us, for them damn rustlers had breastworks throwed up over there and drove ’em away from the river. They’ve got us shut out from the only ford in thirty miles.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” said the colonel, warming at this warlike news.

“Macdonald’s had the gall to send me notice to keep out of that country up the river, and to run my cattle out of there, and it’s my own land, by God! I’ve been grazin’ it for eighteen years!”

“It looks like a serious situation,” the colonel admitted.

“Serious!” There was scorn for the word and its weakness in Chadron’s stress. “It’s hell, I tell you, when a man can’t set foot on his own land!”

“Are they all rustlers up there in the settlement? are there no honest homesteaders among them who would combine with you against this wild man and his unlawful followers?” the colonel wanted to know.

“Not a man amongst ’em that ain’t cut the brand out of a hide,” Chadron declared. “They’ve been nestin’ up there under that man Macdonald for the last two years, and he’s the brains of the pack. He gits his rake-off out of all they run off and sell. Me and the other cattlemen we’ve been feedin’ and supportin’ ’em till the drain’s gittin’ more’n we can stand. We’ve got to put ’em out, like a fire, or be eat up. We’ve got to hit ’em, and hit ’em hard.”

“It would seem so,” the colonel agreed.

“If there is anything that I can do for you in my private capacity, I am at your command,” offered Colonel Landcraft, with official emptiness, “but I regret that I am powerless to grant your request for troops. I couldn’t lift a finger in a matter like this without a department order; you ought to understand that, Chadron.”

“Oh, if that’s all that’s bitin’ you, go ahead—I’ll take care of the department,” Chadron told him, with the relieved manner of one who had seen a light.

“Sir!”

If Chadron had proposed treason the colonel could not have compressed more censure into that word.

“That’s all right,” Chadron assured him, comfortably; “I’ve got two senators and five congressmen back there in Washington that jigger when I jerk the gee-string. You can cut loose and come into this thing with a free hand, and go the limit, the department be damned if they don’t like it!”

Colonel Landcraft’s face was flaming angrily. He snapped his dry old eyelids like flints over the steel of his eyes, and stood as straight as the human body could be drawn, one hand on his sword hilt, the other pointing a trembling finger at Chadron’s face.

Chadron stood a little while, glowering at the colonel. It enraged him to be blocked in that manner by a small and inconsequential man. This he felt Colonel Landcraft to be, measured against his own strength and importance in that country. Himself and the other two big cattlemen in that section of the state lorded it over an area greater than two or three of the old states where the slipping heritage of individual liberty was born. Now here was a colonel in his way; one little old gray colonel!

“All right,” Chadron said at length, charging his words with what he doubtless meant to be a significant foreboding, measuring Colonel Landcraft with contemptuous eye. “I can call out an army of my own. I came to you because we pay you fellers to do what I’m askin’ of you, and because I thought it’d save me time. That’s all.”

“You came to me because you have magnified your importance in this country until you believe you’re the entire nation,” the colonel replied, very hot and red.

“This way, sir, if you please,” he said.

Chadron started out, wrathfully and noisily. Half-way to the door he turned, his dark face sneering in contemptuous scorn.

“Yes, you’re one hell of a colonel!” he said.

Major King was holding the door open; Chadron swung his big body around to face it, and passed out. Major King saluted his superior officer and followed the cattleman into the hall, closing the sacred door behind him on the wrathful little old soldier standing beside his desk. King extended his hand, sympathy in gesture and look.

“If I was in command of this post, sir, you’d never have to ask twice for troops,” he said.

Chadron’s sudden interest seemed to give him the movement of a little start. His grip on the young officer’s hand tightened as he bent a searching look into his eyes.

“King, I believe you!” he said.

Nola came pattering down the stairs. Chadron stood with open arms, and swallowed her in them as she leaped from the bottom tread. Major King did not wait to see her emerge again, rosy and lip-tempting. There was unfinished business within the colonel’s room.

“Mother’s all worked up over it; she’s afraid they’ll burn us out and murder us, but of course we’d clean them up before they’d ever get that far down the river.”

“It looks to me like a very serious situation for everybody concerned,” Frances said. “If your father brings in the men that you say he’s gone to Meander to telegraph for, there’s going to be a lot of killing done on both sides.”

“Father says he’s going to clean them out for good this time—they’ve cost us thousands of dollars in the past three years. Oh, you can’t understand what a low-down bunch of scrubs those rustlers are!”

“Maybe not,” Frances said, giving it up with a little sigh.

“I’ve got to go back to mother this morning, right away, but that little fuss up the river doesn’t need to keep you from going home with me as you promised, Frances.”

“I shouldn’t mind, but I don’t believe father will want me to go out into your wild country. I really want to go—I want to look around in your garden for a glove that I lost there on the night of the ball.”

“Oh, why didn’t you tell me?” Nola’s face seemed to clear of something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and reprovingly at Frances.

“I didn’t miss it until I was leaving, and I didn’t want to delay the rest of them to look for it. It really doesn’t matter.”

“It’s a wonder mother didn’t find it; she’s always prowling around among the flowers,” said Nola, her eyes fixed in abstracted stare, as if she was thinking deeply of something apart from what her words expressed.

What she was considering, indeed, was that her little scheme of alienation had failed. Major King, she told herself, had not returned the glove to Frances. For all his lightness in the matter, perhaps he cared deeply for Frances, and would be more difficult to wean than she had thought. It would have to be begun anew. That Frances was ignorant of her treachery, as she now fully believed, made it easier. So the little lady told herself, surveying the situation in her quick brain, and deceiving herself completely, as many a shrewder schemer than she, when self-entangled in the devious plottings of this life.

No matter for the justice of the homesteaders’ cause, and the sincerity of their leader, neither of which she doubted or questioned, the weight of numbers and resources would be on the side of the cattlemen. It could result only in the homesteaders being driven from their insecure holdings after the sacrifice of many lives. If she could see Macdonald, and appeal to him to put down this foolish, even though well-intended strife, something might result.

It was an inconsequential turmoil, it seemed to her, there in that sequestered land, for a man like Alan Macdonald to squander his life upon. If he stood against the forces which Chadron had gone to summon, he would be slain, and the abundant promise of his life wasted like water on the sand.

“I’ll go with you, Nola,” she said, rising from the table in quick decision.