ple on his hands. That's what
Mark Thorn does, ma'am. Chadron brought him in here a couple of weeks
ago to do some killin' off amongst us homesteaders so the rest 'd take
a scare and move out. He give that old devil a list of twenty men he
wanted shot, and Alan Macdonald's got that paper. His own name's at
the top of it, too."

"Oh!" said she, catching her breath sharply, as if in pain. Her face
was white and cold. "Did he--did he--kill anybody here?"

"He killed my little boy; he shot him down before his mother's eyes!"

Tom Lassiter's guttered neck was agitated; the muscles of his bony jaw
knotted as he clamped his teeth and looked straight along the road
ahead of him.

"Your little boy! Oh, what a coward he must be!"

"He was a little tow-headed feller, and he had his mother's eyes, as
blue as robins' eggs," said Tom, his reminiscent sorrow so poignant
that tears sprung to her eyes in sympathy and plashed down unheeded
and unchecked. "He'd 'a' been fifteen in November. Talkin' about
fightin', ma'am, that's the way some people fights."

"I'm sorry I said that, Mr. Lassiter," she confessed, hanging her head
like a corrected child.

"He can't hear you now," said Tom.

They rode on a little way. Tom told her of the other outrages for
which Thorn was accountable in that settlement. She was amazed as
deeply as she was shocked to hear of this, for if any word of it had
come to the post, it had been kept from her. Neither was it ever
mentioned in Chadron's home.

"No," said Tom, when she mentioned that, "it ain't the kind of news
the cattlemen spreads around. But if we shoot one of them in defendin'
our own, the news runs like a pe-rairie fire. They call us rustlers,
and come ridin' up to swipe us out. Well, they's goin' to be a
change."

"But if Chadron brought that terrible man in here, why should the
horrible creature turn against him?" she asked, doubt and suspicion
grasping the seeming fault in Lassiter's tale.

"Chadron refused to make settlement with him for the killin' he done
because he didn't git Macdonald. Thorn told Alan that with his own
bloody tongue."

Lassiter retailed to her eager ears the story of Macdonald's capture
of Thorn, and his fight with Chadron's men when they came to set the
old slayer free, as Lassiter supposed.

"They turned him loose," said he, "and you know now what I meant when
I said Chadron's chickens has come home to roost."

"Yes, I know now." She turned, and looked bac