ying of a mule and
the cawing of a crow. But Haw-Haw Langley was usually silent, and he
would sit for hours without words, twisting his head and making little
pecking motions as his eyes fastened on face after face. All the
bitterness of the mountain-desert was in Haw-Haw Langley; if his body
looked like a buzzard, his soul was the soul of the vulture itself, and
therefore he had followed the courses of Jerry Strann up and down the
range. He stuffed his gorge with the fragments of his leader's food; he
fed his soul with the dangers which Jerry Strann met and conquered.

In the barroom Haw-Haw Langley had stood turning his sharp little eyes
from Jerry Strann to Dan Barry, and from Dan Barry back to Strann; and
when the shot was fired something like a grin twisted his thin lips; and
when the spot of red glowed on the breast of the staggering man, the
eyes of Haw-Haw blazed as if with the reflection of a devouring fire.
Afterwards he lingered for a few minutes making no effort to aid the
fallen man, but when he had satisfied himself with the extent of the
injury, and when he had noted the froth of bloody bubbles which stained
the lips of Strann, Haw-Haw Langley turned and stalked from the room.
His eyes were points of light and his soul was crammed to repletion with
ill-tidings.

At the hitching rack he stepped into the saddle of a diminutive horse,
whirled it into the street with a staggering jerk of the reins, and
buried the spurs deep in the cow-pony's flanks. The poor brute snorted
and flirted its heels in the air, but Langley wrapped his long legs
around the barrel of his mount and goaded it again.

His smile, which began with the crack of Barry's gun in O'Brien's place,
did not die out until he was many a mile away, headed far up through the
mountains; but as he put peak after peak behind him and as the white
light of the day diminished and puffs of blue shadow drowned the
valleys, the grin disappeared from Haw-Haw's face. He became keenly
intent on his course until, having reached the very summit of a tall
hill, he came to a halt and peered down before him.

It was nearly dusk by this time and the eyes of an ordinary man could
not distinguish a tree from a rock at any great distance; but it seemed
that Haw-Haw was gifted with eyes extraordinary--the buzzard at the top
of its sky-towering circles does not see the brown carcass far below
with more certainty than Haw-Haw sensed his direction. He waited only a
few s