e fascinated eyes of
the girl he appeared little less than a giant.

He stopped and for a moment remained tensely, watchfully still. She felt
his eyes on her; she could not see them in the shadow of his hat, but
had an unpleasant sensation of a pair of sinister eyes narrowing in
their keen regard of her. She shivered as though cold.

Moving again he made his away along the wall and to the bar. He stepped
behind it, still with neither hesitation nor haste, and found the two
mail bags with his feet. And with his feet he pushed them out to the
open, along the wall, toward the door. Hap Smith snarled; his face no
longer one of broad good humour. The shotgun barrel bore upon him
steadily, warningly. Hap's rising hand dropped again.

Then suddenly all was uproar and confusion, those who had been chained
to their chairs or places on the floor springing into action. The man
had backed to the door, swept up the mail bags and now suddenly leaped
backward into the outside night. Hap Smith and four or five other men
had drawn their guns and were firing after him. There were outcries,
above them surging the curses of the stage driver. Bert Stone was
moaning on the floor. The girl wanted to go to him but for a little
merely regarded him with wide eyes; there was a spreading pool on the
bare floor at his side, looking in the uncertain light like spilled ink.
A thud of bare feet, and Ma Drury came running into the room, her night
dress flying after her.

"Pa!" she cried wildly. "You ain't killed, are you, Pa?"

"Bert is, most likely," he answered, swinging across the room to the
fallen man. Then it was that the girl by the fire sprang to her feet
and ran to Bert Stone's side.

"Who was it? What happened?" Ma Drury asked shrilly.

The men looked from one to another of their set-faced crowd. Getting
only silence for her answer Ma Drury with characteristic irritation
demanded again to be told full particulars and in the same breath
ordered the door shut. A tardy squeal and another like an echo came from
the room which harboured Lew Yates's wife and mother-in-law. Perhaps
they had just come out from under the covers for air and squealed and
dived back again ... not being used to the customs obtaining in the
vicinity of Drury's road house as Poke himself had remarked.

Hap Smith was the first one of the men who had dashed outside to return.
He carried a mail bag in each hand, muddy and wet, having stumbled over
them in the wild cha