nyhow."

He bore the foreman's searching scrutiny very well, without a change of
color or the quiver of an eyelash. Nevertheless he was not a little
relieved when Lynch, with a brief comment about trying him out in the
morning, moved around the table and sat down on a bunk to pull off his
chaps. That sudden and complete bottling up of emotion had shown Buck how
much more dangerous the man was than he had supposed, and he was pleased
enough to come out of their first encounter so well.

With a barely perceptible sense of relaxing tension, the poker game was
resumed, for which Buck was devoutly thankful. Throughout the interruption
he had not forgotten his hand, which was by far the best he had held that
evening. He played it and the succeeding ones so well that when the game
ended he had managed to break even.

Ten minutes later the lights were out, and the silence of the bunk-house
was broken only by the regular breathing of eight men, or the occasional
creak of some one shifting his position in the narrow bunk. Having no
blankets--a deficiency he meant to remedy if he could get off long enough
to-morrow to ride to Paloma Springs--Buck removed merely chaps and boots
and stretched his long form on the corn-husk tick with a little sigh of
weariness. Until this moment he had not realized how tired he was. But he
had slept poorly on the train, and this, coupled with the heady air and
the somewhat stirring events of the last few hours, dragged his eyelids
shut almost as soon as his head struck the improvised pillow.

It seemed as if scarcely a moment had passed before he opened them again.
But he knew that it must be several hours later, for it had been
pitch-dark when he went to sleep, and now a square of moonlight lay across
the floor under the southern window, bringing into faint relief the
outlines of the long room.

Just what had roused him he did not know; some noise, no doubt, either
inside the bunk-house or without. Nerves attuned to battle-front
conditions are likely to become sharp as razor-edges, and Buck, starting
from deep slumber to complete wakefulness, was almost instantly aware of
a sense of strangeness in his surroundings.

In a moment he knew what it was. Even though they may not snore, the
breathing of seven sleeping men is unmistakable. Buck did not have to
strain his ears to realize that not a sound came from any of the other
bunks, and swiftly the utter, unnatural stillness became oppressive.

Q