ting Blenham lie
there. Both men were naked to their waists, their shirts and
undershirts in rags and strips hanging grotesquely about their hips;
Royce looked like some hideously painted burlesque of a ballet-dancer
in a comic skirt. Only there was nothing of burlesque or comedy in his
face.

Packard, glancing from him down to the tortured body of Blenham that
breathed jerkily, noisily, turned with a sudden revulsion of feeling
and hurled the heavy blacksnake away from him. He had not fancied the
sharp smell of fresh blood.

"I got him!" said Royce shakily. "With my two hands, I got him!
Didn't I, Stevie?"

"Better than you know, Bill!" muttered Packard. "Better than you know."

The thing had been an accident, at least in so far as Bill Royce's
intent was concerned. Packard knew that; he knew that his old pardner
fought hard, fought mercilessly, but fought fair. But in a larger
sense was it an accident? Or rather a mere retributive punishment
decreed by an eternal justice? There in the pitch dark, for no man to
see the how of it, this is perhaps what had happened:

There had been the old, long-rowelled Mexican spur hanging on the wall;
Royce's shoulder or Blenham's had knocked it down; their feet had
pushed it out to the middle of the floor. They had fallen, together,
heavily; they had rolled. Blenham had gone over on his face, Royce's
hands worrying him. The spur----

But it mattered little how it had come about. The result was the
thing. Blenham would never see with his right eye again.

CHAPTER XIII

AT THE LUMBER CAMP

They did what they could for Blenham--which was but little--and let him
go when he was ready. Before daylight he had ridden away, dead white,
sick-looking, and wordless save for his parting words in a strangely
quiet voice--

"I'll get all three of you for this, s'elp me!"

They had bound his head up in a strip torn from an old sheet; the last
they saw of him in the uncertain light was this bandage, rising and
falling slowly as his horse bore him away.

Blenham gone, Barbee and Bill Royce went down to the bunk-house again,
slipping in quietly. Steve Packard, alone in the ranch-house, sat
smoking his pipe for half an hour. Then he went to bed, the bank-notes
still in his shirt, his gun under his pillow.

Twice last night he had said to Joe Woods, the lumber-camp boss, "I'll
see you in the morning."

Morning come, Steve breakfasted early, saddled his horse, and