The men in the room were
staring even as she stared, in bewilderment. She heard old man Adams's
tongue clicking in his toothless old mouth. She saw Hap Smith, his
expression one of pure amazement, standing, half crouching as though to
spring, his hands like claws at his sides. And all of this because of
the man who stood in the open doorway, looking in.

The man who had shot Bert Stone, who had looted a mail bag, had
returned! That was her instant thought. And clearly enough it was the
thought shared by all of Poke Drury's guests. To be sure he carried no
visible gun and his face was unhidden. But there was the hugeness of
him, bulking big in the doorway, the spare, sinewy height made the
taller by his tall boot heels, the wide black hat with the drooping brim
from which rain drops trickled in a quick flashing chain, the shaggy
black chaps of a cowboy in holiday attire, the soft grey shirt, the grey
neck handkerchief about a brown throat, even the end of a faded bandana
trailing from a hip pocket.

He stood stone-still a moment, looking in at them with that queer
expression in his eyes. Then he stepped forward swiftly and closed the
door. He had glanced sharply at the girl by the fire; she had shaded her
eyes with her hand, the shadow of which lay across her face. He turned
again from her to the men, his regard chiefly for Hap Smith.

"Well?" he said lightly, being the first to break the silence. "What's
wrong?"

There are moments in which it seems as if time itself stood still.
During the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a
cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him. By his sheer physical
bigness, first, he fascinated her. He was like the night and the storm
itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint;
but rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile
after unfenced mile "out yonder" beyond the mountains. As he moved he
gave forth a vital impression of immense animal power; standing still he
was dynamic. A sculptor might have carved him in stone and named the
result "Masculinity."

The brief moment in which souls balanced and muscles were chained passed
swiftly. Strangely enough it was old man Adams who precipitated action.
The old man was nervous; more than that, bred here, he was fearless.
Also fortune had given him a place of vantage. His body was half
screened by that of Hap Smith and by a corner of the bar. His eager old
hand snatched ou