dy, a
dimness in his mind, but he was conscious of her horse rearing, lifting
its feet high--one of them a white-stockinged foot, as he marked with
painful precision--and falling backward in a clatter of shod hoofs on
the railroad.

When it cleared a little, Lambert found the sheriff was on the ground
beside him, supporting him with his arm, looking into his face with
concern almost comical, speaking in anxious inquiry.

"Lay down over there on the platform, Duke, you're shot all to pieces,"
he said.

Lambert sat on the edge of the platform, and the world receded. When he
felt himself sweep back to consciousness there were people about him,
and he was stretched on his back, a feeling in his nostrils as if he
breathed fire. Somebody was lying across from him a little way; he
struggled with painful effort to lift himself and see.

It was Grace Kerr. Her face was white in the midst of her dark hair, and
she was dead.

It was not right for her to be lying there, with dead face to the sky,
he thought. They should do something, they should carry her away from
the stare of curious, shocked eyes, they should--He felt in the pocket
of his vest and found the little handkerchief, and crept painfully
across to her, heedless of the sheriff's protest, defiant of his
restraining, kindly hand.

With his numb left arm trailing by his side, a burning pain in his
breast, as if a hot rod had been driven through him, the track of her
treacherous bullet, he knew, he fumbled to unfold the bit of soft white
linen, refusing the help of many sympathetic hands that were
out-stretched.

When he had it right, he spread it over her face, white again as an
evening primrose, as he once had seen it through the dusk of another
night. But out of this night that she had entered she would ride no
more. There was a thought in his heart as tender as his deed as he thus
masked her face from the white stare of day:

"_She can wipe her eyes on it when she wakes up and repents._"

CHAPTER XXVI

OYSTERS AND AMBITIONS

"If you'd come on and go to Wyoming with me, Duke, I think it'd be
better for you than California. That low country ain't good for a feller
with a tender place in his lights."

"Oh, I think I'm all right and as good as ever now, Taterleg."

"Yes, it looks all right to you, but if you git dampness on that lung
you'll take the consumption and die. I knew a feller once that got shot
that way through the lights in a fight down