“You think I ought to tell you where Cold Feet is?” asked Sinclair without emotion.

“Why not?”

“Him and me sat around the same campfire, sheriff, and ate off’n the same deer.”

At this the sheriff winced.  “I know,” he murmured.  “It’s hard—­mighty hard!” He continued more smoothly:  “But listen to me, partner.  There’s twenty-five-hundred dollars on the head of Cold Feet.  Why not come in?  Why not split on it?  Plenty for both of us; and, speaking personal, I could use half that money, and maybe you could use the other half just as well!”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” said Sinclair, “I’ll give you the layout for finding Cold Feet.  Ride west out of Sour Creek and head for a flat-topped mountain.  On the shoulder just under the head of the peak you’ll find Cold Feet.  Go get him!”

The sheriff caught his breath, then whirled on his heel.  The sharp voice of Sinclair called him back.

“Wait a minute.  I ain’t through.  When you catch Cold Feet you go after him without guns.”

“How come?”

“Because you might hurt him, and he can’t fight, sheriff.  Even if he was to pull a gun, he couldn’t hit nothing with it.  He couldn’t hit the ground he’s standing on with a gun.”

Sheriff Kern scratched his head.

“And when you get him,” went on Sinclair, “tell him to go back and take up his life where he left off, because they’s no harm coming to him.”

“Great guns, man!  No harm coming to him with a murder to his count and a price on his head?”

“I mean what I say.  Break it to him real gentle.”

“And who pays for the killing of Quade?”

Sinclair smiled.  He was finding it far easier to do it than he had ever imagined.  The moment he made the resolve, his way was smoothed for him.

“I pay for Quade,” he said quietly.

“What d’you mean?”

“Because I killed him, sheriff.  Now go tell Cold Feet that his score is clean!”

26

Toward the flat-topped mountain, with the feeling of his fate upon him, Bill Sandersen pushed his mustang through the late evening, while the darkness fell.  He had long since stopped thinking, reasoning.  There was only the strong, blind feeling that he must meet Sinclair face to face and decide his destiny in one brief struggle.

So he kept on until his shadow fell faintly on his path before him, long, shapeless, grotesque.  He turned and saw the moon coming up above the eastern mountains, a wan, sickly moon hardly out of her first quarter, and even in the pure mountain air her light was dim.

But it gave thought and pause to Sandersen.  First there was the outcropping of a singular superstition which he had heard long before and never remembered until this moment:  that a moon seen over the left shoulder meant the worst of bad luck.  It boded very ill for the end of this adventure.

Suppose he were able only partially to surprise the big cowpuncher from the north, and that there was a call for fighting.  What chance would he have in the dim and bewildering light of that moon against the surety of Sinclair who shot, he knew, as other men point the finger —­instinctively hitting the target?  It would be a mere butchery, not a battle.