speculation upon the night's crime.

He knew that men like the Bedloes, hard men living hard lives, have many
enemies. There were the men whom they had cheated at cards, and who had
cheated them, with whom they had drunk and quarrelled. It was clear to
him that any one of a dozen men, bearing a grudge against Charley
Bedloe, but afraid to attack in the open any one of these three brothers
who fought like tigers and who took up one another's quarrels with no
thought of the right and the wrong of it, might have chosen this method.

Yes, this was clear. But one thing was not. The night had passed and
neither the Kid nor Ed Bedloe had called to square with him. He did not
understand this. For he did not believe that even their affiliation with
Broderick and Pollard would have held the Kid and Ed back from their
vengeance now. It was patent that the Kid had leaped to the natural
conclusion that he had killed Charley Bedloe; he understood the emotion
which he had seen depicted in the Kid's twisted face as Charley
staggered and fell at his brother's feet. It was a great, blind grief,
unutterable, wrathful, terrible, like the unreasoning, tempestuous grief
of a wild thing, of a mother bear whose cubs had been shot before her
eyes. For the one thing which it seemed God had put into the natures of
these men was love, the love which led them to seek no wife, no friend,
no confidante outside their own close fraternity. And yet the night had
passed and neither the Kid nor Ed had come.

"Something happened to stop them," mused Thornton. "For a few hours
only. They'll come. And I'd give a hundred dollars to know who the
jasper was that put that bullet into Charley."

He went back into his cabin, put his two guns on the table, threw out
the cartridges, and for fifteen minutes oiled and cleaned. Then, with a
careful eye to every shell, he loaded them again. When he once more
threw his door open and went outside his eyes were a little regretful
but very, very hard.

He was inclined to believe that Winifred was mistaken in judging Ben
Broderick's to be the brains of this thing. He thought that he saw
Pollard's hand directing. Until now he had fully expected to go to Dry
Town, to raise the four thousand five hundred dollars with which to make
his last payment upon the Poison Hole ranch. Now he more than suspected
that this was but a play of Pollard's to get him out of the way while
the last crime be perpetrated, to have him out upon