relief. She
turned away from the door without allowing her glance to fall directly
on the wet spot left by the undertaker's man.

Mother and daughter talked together in low words, only a few of which
now and then reached Morgan as he stood near the counter where the
mutilated register lay, turning this melancholy event in his thoughts.
He recovered the torn crumpled page from the floor, smoothed and
replaced it in the book. A man came in, the woman turning with a quick
glad lighting of the face to meet him.

"O Tommy! I was worried to death!" she said.

Tom Conboy, proprietor of the Elkhorn, as the hotel was called, grunted
in discount of this anxiety as he turned his shifty eyes to the
stranger, flicking them on and off like a fly. He saw the coins dropped
by the cowboy, picked them up, put them in his pocket, face red from
what evidently was unaccustomed effort as he straightened his back.

"You seem to be gettin' mighty flush with money around this joint," he
said, severe censure in his tone.

"He dropped it--the man the marshal shot dropped it--it was his," the
girl explained. "I wouldn't touch it!" she shuddered, "not for anything
in the world!"

"Huh!" said Conboy, easily, entirely undisturbed by the dead man's money
in his pocket.

"My God! I wish he hadn't done it here!" the woman moaned.

"I didn't think he'd shoot him or I wouldn't 'a' called him," the girl
pleaded, pity for the deed in her shocked voice. "He didn't need to do
it--he didn't have to do it, at all!"

"Sh-h-h! No niggers in Ireland, now--no-o-o niggers in Ireland!"

Conboy shook his head at her as he spoke, pronouncing this rather
amazing and altogether irrelevant declaration with the utmost gravity,
an admonitory, cautioning inflection in his naturally grave and resonant
voice. The girl said no more on the needless sacrifice of the young
man's life.

"I was goin' to get this gentleman some dinner," she said.

"You'd better go on and do it, then," her father directed, gently enough
for a man of his stamp, rather surprisingly gentle, indeed, Morgan
thought.

Tom Conboy was a short-statured man, slight; his carefully trimmed gray
beard lending a look of serious wisdom to his face which the shiftiness
of his insincere eyes at once seemed to controvert. He wore neither coat
nor vest, but a white shirt with broad starched bosom, a large gold
button in its collarless neckband. A diamond stud flashed in the middle
of his bosom; red ela