ndicating with a glance of his eye the
skulking figure of Ratler Webb, "Watch him."

Nodding in response to that whisper, Black Tom had strolled casually
over, stationing himself directly behind Bear Cat. His face wore a calm
benignity and his arms were crossed on his breast so peacefully that
one would hardly have guessed the right hand caressed the grip of an
automatic pistol and that the pistol had already been drawn half free
from its hidden holster.

It happened that Ratler's hand, in his coat pocket, was also nursing a
weapon. Ratler was biding his time. He had read into every face a
contemptuous mockery for his surrender of the road to Turner Stacy that
morning. In his disordered brain a fixed idea had festered into the
mandate of a single word: "Revengeance."

Then when Bear Cat had drawn down on himself the wrath of an outraged
camp-meeting Ratler thought his opportunity knocked. The crowd began to
shift and move so that the focus of men's impressions was blurred.
Availing himself of that momentary confusion, he stole a little nearer
and shifted sidewise so that he might see around Black Tom Carmichael's
bulking shoulders. He glanced furtively about him. Kinnard Towers was
looking off abstractedly--another way. No one at front or back seemed
to be noticing him.

Ratler Webb's arm flashed up with a swiftness that was sheer
slight-of-hand and Black Tom's vigilant eye caught a dull glint of blue
metal. With a legerdemain superlatively quick, Carmichael's hand, too,
flashed from his breast. His pistol spoke, and Ratler's shot was a
harmless one into the air. When the startled faces turned that way
Ratler was staggering back with a flesh wound and Black Tom was once
more standing calmly by. On the ground between his feet and Bear Cat
Stacy's, as near to the one as the other, lay a smoking pistol.

"Bear Cat's done shot Ratler Webb!" yelled a treble voice, and again
the agitated crowd broke into a confused roar.

Turner bent quickly toward Blossom and spoke in a tense whisper. "Leave
hyar fer God's sake. This hain't no place fer _you_ right now!"

The girl's eyes leaped into instant and Amazonian fire and, as her chin
came up, she answered in a low voice of unamenable obduracy:

"So long es _you_ stays, I stays, too. I don't aim ter run away."

The crowd was edging in, not swiftly but sullenly and there were faces
through whose snarls showed such yellow fangs as suggested a wolf pack.
Here and there one cou