boys with a notch on their guns, with boastful pride in the knowledge
that they were marked by rangers; the crooked men from the North,
defaulters, forgers, murderers, all pale-faced, flat-chested men not fit
for that wilderness and not surviving; the dishonest cattlemen, hand
and glove with outlaws, driven from their homes; the old grizzled,
bow-legged genuine rustlers--all these Duane had come in contact with,
had watched and known, and as he felt with them he seemed to see that as
their lives were bad, sooner or later to end dismally or tragically, so
they must pay some kind of earthly penalty--if not of conscience, then
of fear; if not of fear, then of that most terrible of all things to
restless, active men--pain, the pang of flesh and bone.

Duane knew, for he had seen them pay. Best of all, moreover, he knew the
internal life of the gun-fighter of that select but by no means small
class of which he was representative. The world that judged him and his
kind judged him as a machine, a killing-machine, with only mind enough
to hunt, to meet, to slay another man. It had taken three endless years
for Duane to understand his own father. Duane knew beyond all doubt that
the gun-fighters like Bland, like Alloway, like Sellers, men who were
evil and had no remorse, no spiritual accusing Nemesis, had something
far more torturing to mind, more haunting, more murderous of rest and
sleep and peace; and that something was abnormal fear of death. Duane
knew this, for he had shot these men; he had seen the quick, dark shadow
in eyes, the presentiment that the will could not control, and then the
horrible certainty. These men must have been in agony at every meeting
with a possible or certain foe--more agony than the hot rend of a
bullet. They were haunted, too, haunted by this fear, by every victim
calling from the grave that nothing was so inevitable as death, which
lurked behind every corner, hid in every shadow, lay deep in the dark
tube of every gun. These men could not have a friend; they could not
love or trust a woman. They knew their one chance of holding on to life
lay in their own distrust, watchfulness, dexterity, and that hope, by
the very nature of their lives, could not be lasting. They had doomed
themselves. What, then, could possibly have dwelt in the depths of
their minds as they went to their beds on a starry night like this, with
mystery in silence and shadow, with time passing surely, and the dark
future and i