, mortgages,
oil stocks, old receipts: he wanted none of these, and tossed them to the
floor as soon as he discovered there were no banknotes among them.
Compartment after compartment he rifled. Behind a package of abstracts he
found a bunch of greenbacks tied together by a rubber band at each end.
The first bill showed that the denomination was fifty dollars. Doble
investigated no farther. He thrust the bulky package into his inside coat
pocket and rose.

Again he listened. No sound broke the stillness of the night. The silence
got on his nerves. He took another big drink and decided it was time to
go.

He blew out the light and once more listened. The lifeless body of his
ally lying within touch of his foot did not disturb the outlaw. He had
not killed him, and if he had it would have made no difference. Very
softly for a large man, he passed to the inner room and toward the back
door. He deflected his course to a cupboard where he knew Steelman kept
liquor and from a shelf helped himself to an unbroken quart bottle of
bourbon. He knew himself well enough to know that during the next
twenty-four hours he would want whiskey badly.

Slowly he unlocked and opened the back door. His eyes searched the yard
and the open beyond to make sure that neither his enemy nor a sheriff's
posse was lurking in the brush for him. He crept out to the stable,
revolver in hand. Here he saddled in the dark, deftly and rapidly,
thrusting the bottle of whiskey into one of the pockets of the
saddlebags. Leading the horse out into the mesquite, he swung to the
saddle and rode away.

He was still in the saddle when the peaks above caught the morning sun
glow in a shaft of golden light. Far up in the gulches the new fallen
snow reflected the dawn's pink.

In a pocket of the hills Doble unsaddled. He hobbled his horse and turned
it loose to graze while he lay down under a pine with the bottle for a
companion.

The man had always had a difficult temper. This had grown on him and been
responsible largely for his decline in life. It had been no part of his
plan to "go bad." There had been a time when he had been headed for
success in the community. He had held men's respect, even though they had
not liked him. Then, somehow, he had turned the wrong corner and been
unable to retrace his steps.

He could even put a finger on the time he had commenced to slip. It had
begun when he had quarreled with Emerson Crawford about his daughter
Joyce. S