asked, and knelt beside the form. The man was lying
just where the lamp-light streamed out from the window, but his face
was in shadow. "Oh, it's that Swede," he added, and rose. "I'll get
somebody; I believe he's dead." He left the Pilgrim standing there and
hurried to the door of the hotel office.

In any other locality a shot would have brought on the run every man
who heard it; but in a "cow-town," especially on a dance night,
shots are as common as shouts. In Hardup that night there had been
periodical outbursts which no one, not even the women, minded in the
least.

So it was not until Billy opened the door, put his head in, and cried:
"Come alive! A fellow's been shot, right out here," that there was a
stampede for the door.

The Pilgrim still stood beside the other, waiting. Three or four
stooped over the man on the ground. Billy was one of them.

"He pulled a gun on me," explained the Pilgrim. "I was trying to take
it away from him, and it went off."

Billy stood up, and, as he did so, his foot struck against a revolver
lying beside the Swede. He looked at the Pilgrim queerly, but he did
not say anything. They were lifting the Swede to carry him into the
office; they knew that he was dead, even before they got him into the
light.

"Somebody better get word to the coroner," said the Pilgrim, fighting
for self-control. "It was self-defense. My God, boys, I couldn't help
it! He pulled a gun on me. Yuh saw it on the ground there, right where
he dropped it."

Billy turned clear around and looked again at the Pilgrim, and the
Pilgrim met his eyes defiantly before he turned away.

"I understood yuh to say it was a knife," he remarked slowly.

The Pilgrim swung back again. "I didn't--or, if I did, I was rattled.
It was a gun--that gun on the ground. He met me there and started a
row and said he'd fix me. He pulled his gun, and I made a grab for it
and it went off. That's all there is to it." He stared hard at Billy.

There was much talk among the men, and several told how they had
heard the Swede "cussing" Walland in the saloon that evening. Some
remembered threats--the threats which a man will foolishly make when
he is pouring whisky down his throat by the glassful. No one seemed to
blame Walland in the least, and Billy felt that the Pilgrim was in a
fair way to become something of a hero. It is not every man who has
the nerve to grab a gun with which he is threatened.

They made a cursory search of the