man of Jim Silent, in the days
when Jim had been a terrible, half-legendary figure. One felt that same
quiet strength as the tawny haired man talked to Barry now; his voice
was a smooth, deep current. But as for Barry himself, Gregg could not
compute the factors which entered into the man. By all outward seeming
that slender, half-timid figure was not a tithe of the force which
either of the others represented, but out of the past Gregg's memory
gathered more and more details, clear and clearer, of the wolf-dog,
the black stallion, and the whistling man who tracked down
Silent--"Whistling Dan" Barry; that was what they called him, sometimes.
Nothing was definite in the mind of Gregg. The stories consisted of
patched details, heard here and there at third or fourth hand, but he
remembered one epic incident in which Barry had ridden, so rumor told,
into the very heart of Elkhead, taken from the jail this very man, this
Lee Haines, and carried him through the cordon of every armed man in
Elkhead. And there was another picture, dimmer still, which an eye
witness had painted: of how, at an appointed hour, Barry met Jim Silent
and killed him.

Out of these thoughts he glanced again at the man in the shadow, half
expecting to find his host swollen to giant size. Instead, he found the
same meager form, the same old suggestion of youth which would not age,
the same pale hands, of almost feminine litheness. Lee Haines talked
on--about a porphyry dyke somewhere to the north--a ledge to be found in
the space of ten thousand square miles--a list of vague clues--an appeal
for Barry to help them find it--and Barry was held listening though ever
seeming to drift, or about to drift, towards the door. Black Bart lay
facing his master, and his snaky head followed every movement. Kate
sat where the firelight barely touched on her, and in her arms she held
Joan, whose face and great bright eyes were turned towards Daddy Dan.
All things in the room centered on the place where the man sat by the
wall, and the sense of something impending swept over Gregg; then a wild
fear--did they know the danger outside? He must make conversation; he
turned to Kate, but at the same moment the voice of Buck Daniels beside
him, close.

"I know how you feel, old man. I remember an old bay hoss of mine, a
Morgan hoss, and when he died I grieved for near onto a year, mostly. He
wasn't much of a hoss to look at, too long coupled, you'd say, and his
legs was sho