ad seen.

The sheepman dropped a hand on his shoulder gently. "Brace up, boy!
Don't you see that the very best thing that could have happened is this.
It's best for y'u, best for the rest of the gang and best for the whole
cattle country. We'll have peace here at last. Now he's gone, honest men
are going to breathe easy. I'll take y'u in hand and set y'u at work on
one of my stations, if y'u like. Anyhow, you'll have a chance to begin
life again in a better way."

"That's right," agreed the blatant youth. "I'm sick of rustling the
mails and other folks' calves. I'm glad he got what was coming to him,"
he concluded vindictively, with a glance at his dead chief and a sudden
raucous oath.

McWilliams's cold blue eye transfixed him "Hadn't you better be a little
careful how your mouth goes off? For one thing, he's daid now; and for
another, he happens to be Mr. Bannister's cousin."

"But--weren't they enemies?"

"That's how I understand it. But this man's passed over the range. A MAN
doesn't unload his hatred on dead folks--and I expect if y'u'll study
him, even y'u will be able to figure out that my friend measures up to
the size of a real man."

"I don't see why if--"

"No, I don't suppose y'u do," interrupted the foreman, turning on his
heel. Then to Bannister, who was looking down at his cousin with a stony
face: "I reckon, Bann, we better make arrangements to have the bodies
buried right here in the valley," he said gently.

Bannister was thinking of early days, of the time when this miscreant,
whose light had just been put out so instantaneously, had played with
him day in and day out. They had attended their first school together,
had played marbles and prisoners' base a hundred times against each
other. He could remember how they used to get up early in the morning to
go fishing with each other. And later, when each began, unconsciously,
to choose the path he would follow in already beginning to settle into
an established fact. He could see now, by looking back on trifles of
their childhood, that his cousin had been badly handicapped in his
fight with himself against the evil in him. He had inherited depraved
instincts and tastes, and with them somewhere in him a strand of
weakness that prevented him from slaying the giants he had to oppose in
the making of a good character. From bad to worse he had gone, and here
he lay with the drizzling rain on his white face, a warning and a lesson
to wayward youths ju