His face was puckered with rage and shame. He went slowly to where Bert Stone lay. His friend was white and unconscious ... perhaps already his tale was told. Hap Smith looked from him to the girl who, her face as white as Bert's, was trying to staunch the flow of blood.

"I said it," he muttered lugubriously; "the devil's own night."

CHAPTER III

BUCK THORNTON, MAN'S MAN

Those who had rushed into the outer darkness in the wake of the highwayman returned presently. Mere impulse and swift natural reaction from their former enforced inactivity rather than any hope of success had sent them hot-foot on the pursuit. The noisy, windy night, the absolute dark, obviated all possibility of coming up with him. Grumbling and theorising, they returned to the room and closed the door behind them.

Now that the tense moment of the actual robbery had pa.s.sed there was a general buzzing talk, voices lifted in surmise, a lively excitement replacing the cosy quiet of a few moments ago. Voices from the spare bed room urged Ma Drury to bring an account of the adventure, and Poke's wife, having first escorted the wounded man to her own bed and donned a wrapper and shoes and stockings, gave to Lew Yates's women folk as circ.u.mstantial a description of the whole affair as though she herself had witnessed it.

After a while a man here and there began to eat, taking a slab of bread and meat in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other, walking back and forth and talking thickly. The girl at the fireplace sat stiff and still, staring at the flames; she had lost her appet.i.te, had quite forgotten it in fact. At first from under the hand shading her eyes she watched the men going for one drink after another, the strong drink of the frontier; but after a little, as though this had been a novel sight in the beginning but soon lost interest for her, she let her look droop to the fire. Fresh dry fuel had been piled on the back log and at last a grateful sense of warmth and sleepiness pervaded her being. She no longer felt hunger; she was too tired, her eyelids had grown too heavy for her to harbour the thought of food. She settled forward in her chair and nodded. The talk of the men, though as they ate and drank their voices were lifted, grew fainter and fainter in her ears, further and further away. Finally they were blended in an indistinguishable murmur that meant nothing.... In a doze she caught herself wondering if the wounded man in the next room would live. It was terribly still in there.

She was in that mental and physical condition when, the body tired and the brain betwixt dozing and waking, thought becomes a feverish process, the mind s.n.a.t.c.hing vivid pictures from the day's experience and weaving them into as illogical a pattern as that of the crazy quilt over her shoulders. All day long she had ridden in the swaying, lurching, jerking stage until now in her chair, as she slipped a little forward, she experienced the sensations of the day. Many a time that day as the racing horses obeying the experienced hand of the driver swept around a sharp turn in the road she had looked down a sheer cliff that had made her flesh quiver so that it had been hard not to draw back and cry out.

She had seen the horses leaping forward scamper like mad runaways down a long slope, dashing through the spray of a rising creek to take the uphill climb on the run. And tonight she had seen a masked man shoot down one of her day's companions and loot the United States mail.... And in a register somewhere she had written down the name of Hill's Corners.

The place men called Dead Man's Alley. She had never heard the name until today. Tomorrow she would ask the exact significance of it....

At last she was sound asleep. She had found comfort by twisting sideways in her chair and resting her shoulder against the warm rock-masonry of the outer edge of the fireplace. She awoke with a start. What had recalled her to consciousness she did not know. Perhaps a new voice in her ears, perhaps Poke Drury's tones become suddenly shrill. Or it may be that just a sudden sinking and falling away into utter silence of all voices, the growing still of hands upon dice cups, all eloquent of a new breathless atmosphere in the room had succeeded in impressing upon her sleep-drugged brain the fact of still another vital, electrically charged moment. She turned in her chair. Then she settled back, wondering.

The door was open; the wind was sweeping in; again old newspapers went flying wildly as though in panicky fear. The men in the room were staring even as she stared, in bewilderment. She heard old man Adams's tongue clicking in his toothless old mouth. She saw Hap Smith, his expression one of pure amazement, standing, half crouching as though to spring, his hands like claws at his sides. And all of this because of the man who stood in the open doorway, looking in.

The man who had shot Bert Stone, who had looted a mail bag, had returned! That was her instant thought. And clearly enough it was the thought shared by all of Poke Drury's guests. To be sure he carried no visible gun and his face was unhidden. But there was the hugeness of him, bulking big in the doorway, the spare, sinewy height made the taller by his tall boot heels, the wide black hat with the drooping brim from which rain drops trickled in a quick flashing chain, the s.h.a.ggy black chaps of a cowboy in holiday attire, the soft grey shirt, the grey neck handkerchief about a brown throat, even the end of a faded bandana trailing from a hip pocket.

He stood stone-still a moment, looking in at them with that queer expression in his eyes. Then he stepped forward swiftly and closed the door. He had glanced sharply at the girl by the fire; she had shaded her eyes with her hand, the shadow of which lay across her face. He turned again from her to the men, his regard chiefly for Hap Smith.

"Well?" he said lightly, being the first to break the silence. "What's wrong?"

There are moments in which it seems as if time itself stood still.

During the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him. By his sheer physical bigness, first, he fascinated her. He was like the night and the storm itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint; but rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile after unfenced mile "out yonder" beyond the mountains. As he moved he gave forth a vital impression of immense animal power; standing still he was dynamic. A sculptor might have carved him in stone and named the result "Masculinity."

The brief moment in which souls balanced and muscles were chained pa.s.sed swiftly. Strangely enough it was old man Adams who precipitated action.

The old man was nervous; more than that, bred here, he was fearless.

Also fortune had given him a place of vantage. His body was half screened by that of Hap Smith and by a corner of the bar. His eager old hand s.n.a.t.c.hed out Hap Smith's dragging revolver, levelled it and steadied it across the bar, the muzzle seeking the young giant who had come a step forward.

"Hands up!" clacked the old man in tremulous triumph. "I got you, dad burn you!" And at the same instant Hap Smith cried out wonderingly:

"Buck Thornton! You!"

The big man stood very still, only his head turning quickly so that his eyes were upon the feverish eyes of old man Adams.

"Yes," he returned coolly. "I'm Thornton." And, "Got me, have you?" he added just as coolly.

Winifred Waverly stiffened in her chair; already tonight had she heard gunshots and smelled powder and seen spurting red blood. A little surge of sick horror brought its tinge of vertigo and left her clear thoughted and afraid.

"Hands up, I say," repeated the old man sharply. "I got you."

"You go to h.e.l.l," returned Thornton, and his coolness had grown into curt insolence. "I never saw the man yet that I'm going to do that for."

He came on two more quick, long strides, thrust his face forward and cried in a voice that rang out commandingly above the crash of the wind, "_Drop that gun! Drop it!_"

Old man Adams had no intention of obeying; he had played poker himself for some fifty odd years and knew what bluff meant. But for just one brief instant he was taken aback, fairly shocked into a fluttering indecision by the thunderous voice. Then, before he could recover himself the big man had flung a heavy wet coat into Adams's face, a gun had been fired wildly, the bullet ripping into the ceiling, and Buck Thornton had sprung forward and whipped the smoking weapon from an uncertain grasp. Winifred Waverly, without breathing and without stirring, saw Buck Thornton's strong white teeth in a wide, good humoured smile.

"I know you were just joking but..."

He whirled and fired, never lifting the gun from his side. And a man across the room from him cried out and dropped his own gun and grasped his shoulder with a hand which slowly went red.

Now again she saw Buck Thornton's teeth. But no longer in a smile. He had seemed to condone the act of old Adams as a bit of senility; the look in his eyes was one of blazing rage as this other man drew back and back from him, muttering.

"I'd have killed you then," said Thornton coldly, his rage the cold wrath that begets murder in men's souls. "But I shot just a shade too quick. Try it again, or any other man here draw, and by G.o.d, I'll show you a dead man in ten seconds."

He drew back and put the bar just behind him. Then with a sudden gesture, he flung down the revolver which had come from Hap Smith's holster and more recently from old man Adams's fingers, and his hand flashed to his arm pit and back into plain sight, his own weapon in it.

"I don't savvy your game, sports," he said with the same cool insolence.

"But if you want me to play just go ahead and deal me a hand."

To the last man of them they looked at him and hesitated. It was written in large bold script upon the faces of them that the girl's thought was their thought. And yet, though there were upward a dozen of them and though Poke Drury's firelight flickered on several gun barrels and though here were men who were not cowards and who did not lack initiative, to the last man of them they hesitated. As his glance sped here and there it seemed to stab at them like a knife blade. He challenged them and stood quietly waiting for the first move. And the girl by the fire knew almost from the first that no hostile move was forthcoming. And she knew further that had a man there lifted his hand Buck Thornton's promise would have been kept and he'd show them a dead man in ten seconds.

"Suppose," said Thornton suddenly, "you explain. Poke Drury, this being your shack.... What's the play?"

Drury moistened his lips. But it was Hap Smith who spoke up.

"I've knowed you some time, Buck," he said bluntly. "An' I never knowed you to go wrong. But ... Well, not an hour ago a man your build an' size an' with a bandana across his face stuck this place up."

"Well?" said Thornton coolly.

"At first," went on the stage driver heavily and a bit defiantly, "we thought it was him come back when you come in." His eye met Thornton's in a long unwavering look. "We ain't certain yet," he ended briefly.

Thornton pondered the matter, his thumb softly caressing the hammer of his revolver.

"So that's it, is it?" he said finally.

"That's it," returned Hap Smith.

"And what have you decided to do in the matter?"

Smith shrugged. "We acted like a pack of kids," he said. "Lettin' you get the drop on us like this. Oh, you're twice as quick on the draw as the best two of us an' we know it. An' ... an' we ain't dead sure as we ain't made a mistake."

His candidly honest face was troubled. He was not sure that Thornton was the same man who so short a time ago had shot Bert Stone. It did not seem reasonable to Hap Smith that a man, having successfully made his play, would return just to court trouble.

"If you're on the square, Buck," he said in a moment, "throw down your gun an' let's see the linin' of your pockets!"

"Yes?" retorted Thornton. "What else, Mr. Smith?"

"Let us take a squint at that bandana trailin' out'n your back pocket,"

said Smith crisply. "If it ain't got deep holes cut in it!"