ut heart or speed. Even in spite of her
history Vic would have engaged Grey Molly to beat the roan at equal
weights, but since he outbulked the sheriff full forty pounds, he
weighed in nice balance the necessity of shooting the roan before he
left Alder. It was, he decided, unpleasant but vital, and his fingers
had already slid around the butt of his gun when a horse whinnied far
off and the roan twitched up her head to listen. She was no longer a
cloddish lump of horseflesh, but an individual, a soul; Gregg's hand
fell from his gun. Cursing his sentimental weakness, he lifted Molly
into a canter down the street. Still no signs of awakening behind him or
about; only little Jack Sweeney playing tag with a black-and-tan puppy,
the triumphant cackle of a hen somewhere to the left; but as he neared
the end of the street, where the trail swung into the rocks of the
slope, a door banged far off and a voice was screaming: "Pete! Pete
Glass!"

Grey Molly switched her tail nervously at the shout, but Vic was too
wise to let her waste strength hurrying up so sharp a declivity; that
dusty roan whose life he had spared would be spending it prodigally to
overtake him before long and Molly's power must be husbanded. So he kept
her at a quick walk by pressing the calf of one leg into her flank and
turned in the saddle to watch the town sink behind him. Sometime in the
vague, stupid past Marne had jog-trotted down this slope, but now he
was a new man with an eye which saw all things and a gun which could not
fail. Figures, singularly tiny and singularly distinct, swarmed into the
street from nowhere, men on horses, men swinging into saddles; here
and there the slant light of the afternoon twinkled on gun barrels, and
ludicrous thin voices came piping up the hill. As he reached the nether
lip of Murphy's Pass a small cavalcade detached itself from the main
mass before Captain Lorrimer's saloon and swept down the street, first a
dusty figure on a dusty horse, hardly visible; then a spot of red which
must be Harry Fisher on his blood-bay, with a long-striding sorrel
beside him that could carry no one except grim old Sliver Waldron.
Behind these rode one with the light glinting on his silver conchos--Mat
Henshaw, the town Beau Brummel--then the black Guss Reeve, and last of
all "Ronicky" Joe on his pinto; "Ronicky" Joe, handy man at all things,
and particularly guns. It showed how fast Pete Glass could work and how
well he knew Alder, for