dy to cry, walking
unsteadily behind Jack, both his arms gripped by others of the
Vigilance Committee. There were two crude stretchers, borne by
stolid-faced miners in red flannel shirts and clay-stained boots.
On the first a dead man lay grinning up at the sun, his teeth just
showing under his bushy mustache, a trickle of red running down from
his temple. On the next a man groaned and mumbled blasphemy between
his groanings.

Bill took it all in, a single glance for each,--a glance trained by
gambling to see a great deal between the flicker of his lashes. He
did not seem to look once at the Captain, yet he knew that Jack's
ivory-handled pistols hung at the Captain's rocking hips as he went
striding past; and he knew that malice lurked under the grizzled hair
which hid the Captain's cruel lips; and that satisfaction glowed in
the hard, sidelong glance he gave his prisoner.

He stood until he saw Jack duck his head under the tent flaps of the
jail and the white-faced youth follow shrinking after. He stood while
the armed guards took up their stations on the four sides of the
tent and began pacing up and down the paths worn deep in tragic
significance. He saw the wounded man carried into Pete's place across
the way, and the dead man taken farther down the street. He saw the
crowd split into uneasy groups which spoke a common tongue, that they
might exchange unasked opinions upon this, the biggest sensation since
Sandy left town with his ankles tied under the vicious-eyed buckskin
whose riders rode always toward the west and whose saddle was always
empty when he came back to his stall at the end of the town. Bill saw
it all, to the last detail; but after his one explosive oath, he was
apparently the most indifferent of them all.

When the Captain ended his curt instructions to the guard and came
towards him, Bill showed a disposition to speak.

"Who's the kid?" he drawled companionably, while his fingers itched
upon the hammer, and the soul of him lusted for sight of the hole it
could make in the skull of the Captain. "I don't recollect seeing him
around town--and there ain't many faces I forget, either."

The Captain shot him a surprised look that was an unconscious tribute
to Bill's diplomatic art. But Bill's level glance would have disarmed
a keener man than Tom Perkins.

Perkins stopped. "Stranger, from what he said--though I've got my
doubts. Some crony of Allen's, I expect. It was him done the shooting;
the k