dead thing at
her feet.

The white rim of the sun had just slid over the top of a mountain.

28

She dropped to her knees, and with a sudden, hysterical strength she
was able to turn him on his back. He was dead. The first glimpse of his
face told her that. She looked up into the eyes of the murderer.

Arizona was methodically cleaning his gun. His color had not changed.
There was a singular placidity about all his movements.

"I just hurried up what was coming to him," said Arizona coolly, as he
finished reloading his Colt. "Sinclair was after him, and that meant he
was done for."

Oddly enough, she found that she was neither very much afraid of the
fat man, nor did she loathe him for his crime. He seemed outside of the
jurisdiction of the laws which govern most men.

"You said Sinclair is in jail."

"Sure, and he is. But they don't make jails strong enough in these
parts to hold Sinclair. He'd have come out and landed Sandersen, just
as he's going to come out and land Cartwright. What has he got agin'
Cartwright, d'you know?"

Oh, it was incredible that he could talk so calmly with the dead man
before him.

"I don't know," she murmured and drew back.

"Well, take it all in all," pursued Arizona, "this deal of mine is
pretty rotten, but you'd swing just the same for one murder as for two.
They won't hang you no deader, eh? And when they come to look at it,
this is pretty neat. Sandersen wasn't no good. Everybody knowed that.
But he had one thing I wanted--which was you and the twenty-five
hundred that goes with the gent that brings you into Sour Creek. So, at
the price of one bullet, I get the coin. Pretty neat, I say ag'in."

Dropping the revolver back into the holster he patted it with a
caressing hand.

"There's your gun," went on Arizona, chuckling. "It's got a bullet
fired out of it. There's Sandersen's gun with no bullet fired, showing
that, while he was stalking you, you shot and drilled him. Here's my
gun with no sign of a shot fired. Which proves that I just slid in here
and stuck you up from behind, while you were looking over the gent
you'd just killed."

He rubbed his hands together, and bracing himself firmly on his stubby
legs, looked almost benevolently on Jig.

Not only did she lose her horror of him, but she gained an impersonal,
detached interest in the workings of his mind. She looked on him not as
a man but as a monster in the guise of a man.

"Two deaths," she said qui