from the north.

There was no light in Quade's house, but there was just a chance that
the owner had gone to bed early. Bill Sandersen dismounted to find out,
and dismounting, he stumbled across a soft, inert mass in the path. A
moment later he was on his knees, and the flame of the sulphur match
sputtered a blue light into the dead face of Quade, staring upward to
the stars. Bill Sandersen remained there until the match singed his
finger tips.

All doubt was gone now. Lowrie and Quade were both gone; and he,
Sandersen, alone remained, the third and last of the guilty. His first
strong impulse, after his agitation had diminished to such a point that
he was able to think clearly again, was to flee headlong into the night
and keep on, changing horses at every town he reached until he was over
the mountains and buried in the shifting masses of life in some great
city.

And then he recalled Riley Sinclair, lean and long as a hound. Such a
man would be terrible on the trail--tireless, certainly. Besides there
was the horror of flight, almost more awful than the immediate fear of
death. Once he turned his back to flee from Riley Sinclair, the
gunfighter would become a nightmare that would haunt him the rest of
his life. No matter where he fled, every footstep behind him would be
the footfall of Riley Sinclair, and behind every closed door would
stand the same ominous figure. On the other hand if he went back and
faced Sinclair he might reduce the nightmare to a mere creature of
flesh and blood.

Sandersen resolved to take the second step.

In one way his hands were tied. He could not accuse Sinclair of this
killing without in the first place exposing the tale of how Riley's
brother was abandoned in the desert by three strong men who had been
his bunkies. And that story, Sandersen knew, would condemn him to worse
than death in the mountain desert. He would be loathed and scorned from
one end of the cattle country to the other.

All of these things went through his head, as he jogged his mustang
back down the hill. He turned in at Mason's place. All at once he
recalled that he was not acting normally. He had just come from seeing
the dead body of his best friend. And yet so mortal was his concern for
his own safety that he felt not the slightest touch of grief or horror
for dead Quade.

He had literally to grip his hands and rouse himself to a pitch of
semihysteria. Then he spurred his horse down the path, flung himse