"

She touched his cheeks with her hands. "Don't go!" she repeated. "Nothing
can be undone."

"But a man's job isn't to undo things--it's to do them."

She held her face high as if the waters were engulfing her. "Don't go!"
she said again; and her eyes were swimming, so that at the last she did
not see him go, and did not know that he had kept that look of placid
courage to the end.

It was a little early for the usual Sunday morning loiterers to be about
as Harboro entered the town. For a moment he believed there was no one
about at all. The little town, with its main street and its secondary
thoroughfares bordered by low structures, might have been regarded as the
habitation of lesser creatures than human beings, as it stood there musing
after the departed night, in the midst of limitless wastes of sand. That
group of houses might have been likened to some kind of larger birds,
hugging the earth in trepidation, ready to take flight at any moment.

Yet Harboro had been mistaken in supposing that no one was as yet astir.
Two men stood out in the street, at the entrance to the Maverick bar, near
a hitching-post to which a small horse carrying a big saddle was tethered.
One of the men was about to mount. As Harboro approached he untied his
horse and lifted one foot to its stirrup, and stood an instant longer to
finish what he was saying, or perhaps to hear the other out.

The other man was in his shirt-sleeves. He carried a blue-serge sack-coat
over his arm. He stood facing Harboro as the latter approached; and the
expression in his eyes seemed to change in a peculiar way at sight of the
big, swarthy man who stepped off the sidewalk, down into the street, and
seemed to be headed directly toward him.

The two men had never met before; but Harboro, taking in that compact,
muscular figure, found himself musing with assurance: "That is Fectnor."

Nothing in his face or carriage betrayed his purpose, and the man with the
blue-serge garment on his arm kept his ground complacently. The man with
the horse mounted and rode away.

Harboro advanced easily until he was within arm's length of the other man
in the street. "You're Fectnor, aren't you?" he asked.

"I am," replied the other crisply.

Harboro regarded him searchingly. At length he remarked: "Fectnor, I see
you've got a gun on you."

"I have," was the steely response. Fectnor's narrow blue eyes became,
suddenly, the most alert thing about a body which was all a