all, gaunt, dark shaggy man was standing there, an old flapping hat
drooping over his scowling eyes. He was a man with a great branching
mustache, and the under lid of one eye was drawn down upon his cheek
in a little point, as if caught by a surgical hook and held ready for
the knife; a man who bent forward from the middle, as if from long
habit of skulking under cover of low-growing shrubs; an evil man,
whose foul soul cried of bloody deeds through every feature of his
leering face.

"Oh, that man! that man!" cried Nola, in fearful, wild scream.

Mrs. Chadron clasped her in her arms and turned her defiant face
toward the man in the door. He was standing just as he had stood when
they first saw him, silent, still; as grim as the shadow of Saul
Chadron's sins.

The soldiers who stood around Major King looked on with puzzled eyes;
Colonel Landcraft frowned. Macdonald from his cot could not see the
door, but he felt the sharp striking of those charged seconds. Chadron
moved to one side a little, his fixed eyes on the man in the door, his
hand nearer his revolver now; so near that his fingers touched it, and
now it was in his hand with a sudden bright flash into the light.

Two shots in that quiet room, one following the other so closely that
they seemed but a divided one; two shots, delivered so quickly after
Nola's awful scream that no man could whip up his shocked nerves to
obedience fast enough to interpose. Saul Chadron pitched forward, his
hands clutching, his arms outspread, and fell dead, his face groveling
upon the floor. Outside, the soldiers lifted Mark Thorn, a bullet
through his heart.

CHAPTER XXIII

TEARS IN THE NIGHT

They buried Saul Chadron next day in a corner of the garden by the
river. And there was the benediction of tender autumn sunshine over
the place where they laid him down, away from the turmoil of his life,
and the tangle of injustices that he left behind.

But there was none to come forward and speak for the body of Mark
Thorn. The cowboys hid him in the sage at the foot of a butte, as men
go silently and shadow-like to bury away a shame.

There seemed to be a heart-soreness over the ranchhouse by the river
as night fell upon it again. Saul Chadron had been a great and noble
man to some who wept in its silent rooms as the gloaming deepened into
darkness over the garden, where the last leaves of autumn were tugging
at their anchorage to sail away. Even Frances Landcraft in he