"If I could only have a smoke," he muttered, "it wouldn't be so bad waiting to see what the play is."

But still he waited, determined not to leave until possessed of the certainty of there being no need of staying longer. Cautiously he approached the house until he could have put out his foot to the first of the steps leading up to the little porch. There he stopped, telling himself that doubtless he was just playing Tom-fool here in his enemy's garden. Less and less did he like the idea of prowling about the place of Henry Pollard at this time of night.

But now at last there was a sound to vibrate against the empty silence in his ears, a little sound which at first he could not a.n.a.lyse and could not locate. He could hardly be sure whether his senses had tricked him or if he actually heard it. It seemed rather that he had _felt_ it.

His body grew very tense as he tried to know where it was, what it was.

But again the silence was heavier and more oppressive than before.

At last, through the void of the absolute stillness, it came again. Now he knew what it was although not even yet could he be certain whence it came. It was a cautious step ... it might have been a man's step or a woman's. No muscle of his rigid body moved save alone the muscles which turned his eyes to right and left.

At first he thought that there was some one moving toward him from behind, some one who had perhaps just come in through the gate or had been hidden in the straggling shrubbery. And the next instant he knew that the sounds were in front of him, that what he heard was some one walking in the house, tiptoeing cautiously, and yet not silently because the old boards of the floor whined and creaked under the slow tread. Had the night been less still, had his ears been less ready for any sound the faint creak-creak would not have reached him.

"Woman or man?" was his problem. "Winifred Waverly or Henry Pollard?"

There came a second sound and this he recognized; the sc.r.a.ping of dry wood against dry wood, the moving of the bars which the countryside knew that Henry Pollard used as the nightlock upon his doors. Thornton drew back a little, step by step, slowly, silently, and stopped under the pear trees. Now he was ten feet from the first of the front steps, ten feet from the board walk.

When a man must trust everything to his ears for guidance his ears may tell him much. Thornton knew when the bars were down and when the door was opening very slowly. And then, suddenly, he knew that there was a third person out here in the garden close to him, and that this person ... man or woman? ... was moving with as great a slow caution as himself and the other some one in the house. There was the crack of a twig snapping underfoot ... silence ... slow cautious steps again.

The cowboy moved again, a bare two steps now, and stopped, his back against the trunk of the largest of the pear trees, his eyes running back and forth between the door he could not see and the moving some one he could not see at the corner of the house. His widened nostrils had stiffened, as though he would scent out these beings, and his eyes were the alert eyes of an animal in the forest seeking its enemy through the denseness of a black undergrowth.

The door was open, the soft step was at the threshold. The other step at the corner of the house had stopped. In the new silence the cowboy could hear his own deep, regular breathing. He could see nothing, he knew that his body pressed against the tree trunk could not be seen, and his hands were ready. He began to long for a pistol shot, for the spurt of red fire, for anything that would mean certainty and would release the coiled springs of his tense muscles.

But the still minutes dragged by and there was no certainty of anything save that the some one at the door and the some one at the corner of the house at Thornton's right were standing as still, as tense, as himself.

A little sense of the grim humour of this game three people were playing in the dark, this Blind Man's Buff which he was waiting to understand, drew his lips into a quick, fleeting smile.

Now at last came the first bit of certainty. The some one at the door moved again, came to the steps and down into the garden, taking the steps slowly, with long pauses between. This some one was a man. Dimly Thornton saw the blur of the form, but more than his eyes his ears told him that this tread, though guarded, was too heavy for a girl like Winifred Waverly.

"Pollard," he told himself swiftly. "Not ten feet away. And if he comes this way ..."

The man at the steps stopped and in the long silence Thornton knew that the two other people playing this grim game with him were listening even as he was, trying to force their eyes to see through the shadows. Then the heavy tread again, and Thornton thought that it was coming nearer.

Then a pause, the step once more, and Pollard, if Pollard it were, had turned the other way and keeping close to the house was moving toward the far corner. The steps grew fainter as they drew farther away, and he knew that the man had gone around the corner of the building.

That other person at the other corner of the house, at Thornton's right, had heard and understood, too. The cowboy heard steps there again, quick steps, almost running, soft, quick breathing not a yard away, and bending forward a little, knew that Winifred Waverly had come to keep her tryst with him.

"Miss Waverly?" he whispered softly.

She was at his side, close to him, so close that he could feel the sweep of her skirts against his boots. She, too, had leaned forward, her face lifted up to his, her eyes seeking to make sure who this man was.

"Buck Thornton?" she whispered back.

"Yes. What is it?"

"Here. Quick!" She had thrust a folded paper into his fingers, closing them tightly upon it. "Now, go! Do what I tell you in it. Henry Pollard suspects something; he is looking for me. Go quickly!"

She was already pa.s.sing him, hastening toward the steps and the front door.

"Wait!" he commanded, his hand hard upon her arm. "I don't understand...."

"For G.o.d's sake let me go!" Only a whisper, but he thought he heard a quiver of terror in it, he knew that her arm was trembling violently.

"He'd kill me. ... Oh, my G.o.d, go!"

"If there is danger for you..."

"There is none if you go now ... if he doesn't find me here. Please, Buck...."

She jerked away from him and went swiftly to the steps. He could hear her every step now so plainly his heart stood still with fear that Pollard must hear, too. He heard her go to the door; she pa.s.sed on, and so became one with the blot of darkness within the house. Then he drew back, slowly, half regretfully, back toward the gate, stopping for a last time under the trees there. And after a very long time he heard Pollard's steps again. The man had made a tour of his grounds, keeping rather close to the house, and now mounted the steps with no effort at silence, slammed the door and dropped the bars into place. It was as though he had flung them angrily into their sockets. Thornton went out of the yard and to his waiting horse.

"She says to go away, to leave her there alone with Pollard," he muttered dully. "And something's up. She said he'd kill her if he knew that she was talking to me..."

He hesitated, his horse's tie rope in his hand, of half a mind to go back, to force his way into Henry Pollard's house, to demand to know what was wrong, to take the girl away if there were real danger to her.

But then the urgent pleading in her voice came back to him, her insistence that he go, that with him gone there would no longer be any danger for her. Slowly, regretfully, he swung into the saddle. He had made up his mind. He would obey her at least in part, he would go where he could read the paper she had given him, and then perhaps he would understand.

"Any way," he said under his breath, "she's a real girl for you."

He rode swiftly the five hundred yards through the dark street which ran as nearly parallel with the main street as two such crooked streets could approximate parallelism, until he was behind the Here's How Saloon. Here he dismounted and, leaving his horse with reins thrown over his head to the ground, strode off toward the side door of the saloon.

Under the window he glanced in swiftly. Chance had it that the cover was off of the little used billiard table and that two men, in shirt-sleeved comfort, were playing. Both men he knew. They were Charley Bedloe and his brother, the Kid.

The Bedloe boys were intent upon their game, the Kid laughing softly at a miscue Charley had made. Charley was chalking his cue angrily and cursing his luck and neither of them glanced toward the window.

Thornton, drawing back a little so that he would not be seen did they happen to look his way, unfolded the paper Winifred had given him.

"Watch me play out my string, Charley!" he heard the Kid call banteringly. Then he heard nothing more from the room, nothing to tell him of another man not ten steps from him in the darkness, for his whole mind had been caught by Winifred's first words.

"I have wronged you from the beginning," she had written. "I thought that I had seen you that day on the trail behind me. You denied it. I thought that you were lying to me. While you were out after the horses a man, masked, came into the cabin and robbed me of the five thousand dollars I was taking to Henry Pollard. I _thought that it was you_! The man was dressed as you were dressed, his grey handkerchief even was like yours. Now I know it was a man named Ben Broderick who robbed me, and that he wanted me to think that it was you.

"Can't you see the whole scheme? Broderick and the men who are with him, have been committing these crimes. And pretty soon, in a few days, in five days I think, they will be ready to make the evidence show that you are the man who has done it all."

There was more; there were several sheets of paper, closely written.

Thornton saw the names of Henry Pollard, of Cole Dalton. But he read no further. In one instant the mind which had been so intent upon these things a girl's writing was telling him forgot Winifred Waverly, Henry Pollard, Broderick--everything except that which was happening at his side.

For, while he read, there had been the sharp crack of a revolver, he saw the spit of angry reddish flame almost at his side, and as he saw he dropped to his knee, Winifred's note in his left hand, his right flashing to his own revolver. For his first thought was that a man had crept up behind him, that it was Pollard, that he was shooting at him.

But almost with the flash and the report of the gun he knew that this man was not shooting at him. There came the crash and tinkle of broken gla.s.s, one of the small panes of the window beside which Thornton had been reading dropped out, and almost before the falling pieces had ceased to rattle against the bare floor he heard the sound of running footsteps behind him. The man who had fired had made sure with one shot.

Then Thornton heard the Kid cry out, his voice hoa.r.s.e and inarticulate, and with the cry came a moan from Charley Bedloe. Charley staggered half across the room, his two big hands going automatically to his hips. He had come close to his younger brother, staring at him with wide eyes, and then slipped forward and down, quiet and limp and dead.

Thornton's one first emotion, one so natural to a man who takes his fight in the open, was a boundless rage toward the man who had murdered another man in this cold blooded fashion, taking his grim toll from the darkness and without warning. He whirled about, his own gun blazing in his hand, and as fast as his finger could work the trigger sent six shots after the flying footsteps.

The footsteps were gone. Again the cowboy looked swiftly in at the window. He saw that Charley Bedloe was dead; the Kid, his face contorted, hideously twisted to his blended rage and grief, stood staring about him helplessly. Then, the moment of paralysis gone, the Kid suddenly leaped over his brother's body and ran to the window.

"It's Buck Thornton!" roared the Kid. Both of his big guns were already in his hands. "Take that, you...."

Then Buck Thornton, making most of an unforeseen situation, did a thing that he had never done before in his life, which he never would do again. He turned and ran, stumbling through the darkness into which one leap carried him.

For he knew that the Kid had no shadow of a shred of doubt that he had killed Charley Bedloe, he knew that if he did not run for it, run like a scared rabbit now, why then he'd have to kill the Kid or the Kid would kill him. He had no wish to meet his death for the cowardly act of another man and he had no wish to kill Kid Bedloe because another man had murdered his brother. If there were anything left to him but to run for it, he did not know what it was.

He found his horse, leaped into the saddle and turned out toward the north.

"The Kid sure had his nerve, running right up to the window after Charley dropped," he muttered, with the abrupt beginning of the first bit of admiration he had ever felt for a man whom he had appraised as even lower in the scale than "Rattlesnake" Pollard. "The boy is game!

And now he's going to come out after me, and there won't be any talking done and it's going to be Kid Bedloe or me. And," with much certainty, but with a little sigh, half regretful, "the Kid is just a shade slow on the draw. Sure as two and two I've got to kill him. Oh, h.e.l.l," he concluded disgustedly. "Why did this have to happen? Haven't I got enough on my hands already?"