, his face
contorted, hideously twisted to his blended rage and grief, stood
staring about him helplessly. Then, the moment of paralysis gone, the
Kid suddenly leaped over his brother's body and ran to the window.

"It's Buck Thornton!" roared the Kid. Both of his big guns were already
in his hands. "Take that, you...."

Then Buck Thornton, making most of an unforeseen situation, did a thing
that he had never done before in his life, which he never would do
again. He turned and ran, stumbling through the darkness into which one
leap carried him.

For he knew that the Kid had no shadow of a shred of doubt that he had
killed Charley Bedloe, he knew that if he did not run for it, run like a
scared rabbit now, why then he'd have to kill the Kid or the Kid would
kill him. He had no wish to meet his death for the cowardly act of
another man and he had no wish to kill Kid Bedloe because another man
had murdered his brother. If there were anything left to him but to run
for it, he did not know what it was.

He found his horse, leaped into the saddle and turned out toward the
north.

"The Kid sure had his nerve, running right up to the window after
Charley dropped," he muttered, with the abrupt beginning of the first
bit of admiration he had ever felt for a man whom he had appraised as
even lower in the scale than "Rattlesnake" Pollard. "The boy is game!
And now he's going to come out after me, and there won't be any talking
done and it's going to be Kid Bedloe or me. And," with much certainty,
but with a little sigh, half regretful, "the Kid is just a shade slow on
the draw. Sure as two and two I've got to kill him. Oh, hell," he
concluded disgustedly. "Why did this have to happen? Haven't I got
enough on my hands already?"

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FRAME-UP

Thornton returned to his cabin long before the first faint streak of
daylight, and not once during the night did he think of sleep. At his
little table in the light of his coal-oil lamp he read over and over the
hurried words which Winifred Waverly had been driven to put on paper for
him. At first his look was merely charged with perplexity; then there
came into it incredulity and finally sheer amazement.

"The pack of hounds!" he cried softly when he had done, his fist
striking hard upon his table. "The pack of low down, dirty hounds!"

For now, in a flash, he saw and understood beyond the limits to which
the girl's vision had gone, grasping explanations den