end of the line was the stranger from the East, representative of another world.  Piteous, horrible, the others had been; but he—­but for his clothes, his most intimate friend would not have recognised him at that moment.  In him, blind, racking terror was personified.  To have saved his soul he could not keep still, and his heavy walking shoes grated as they shuffled on the rough floor.  He had bitten his lip and the blood stood in his mouth and trickled down, down his clean-shaven face.  His eyes, like those of Slim Simpson, were abnormally wide, but shifting constantly in a hopeless search for a place of concealment, of safety.  If aught in his life merited retribution, the man paid the price a hundred times over and over that second.

Thus man by man they stood waiting; a background no art could reproduce, no stage manager prodigal of expense.  If on earth there ever was a hell, that tiny frontier room with the smoke-blackened ceiling and the single kerosene lamp sputtering on the wall, was the place.  Not an imp thereof, but Satan himself, stood in the misshapen boots of Cowman Pete; doubly vicious in the aftermath of a debauch, Pete with the lust of blood in his veins.  And against him, scant hope to those who watched, was a man; tall, but not heavy, smooth-cheeked as a boy of fourteen, soft-eyed, soft-handed, without the semblance of a weapon.  One branded unmistakably a sleeper, a dreamer, one apparently helpless as a woman.  Yet there that night, within the space of minutes, from the time there fell that last speaking silence, with this man the chief actor, there took place something, the report of which spread swifter than wildfire, from the river to the Hills, from the north Bad Lands to the sandy Platte, that will live and be repeated while tales of nerve and of man mastery quicken the pulses of listeners.  For after that night Coyote Centre knew Long Pete Sweeney no more; Dakota knew him no more.  Not that he was murdered in cold blood as he had murdered others:  it was not that.  Alone, unmolested, he left, in the starlight of that very night; but he knew, and they who permitted him to go, knew that it had been better—­

But we anticipate.

“I’m listening, How Landor,” he had said.

But he heard nothing:—­yet he saw.  He saw a tall, lithe, catlike figure straighten until it seemed fairly to tower.  He saw this same figure look at him fully, squarely; as though for the first time really conscious of his presence.  He saw two unflinching black eyes, flanked by high cheek bones, out of a copper-brown face meet his own, meet them and hold them; hold them immovably, hold them so he could not look away.  He saw the owner of those eyes move—­he did not hear, there was no sound, not even a pat from the moccasined feet, he merely saw—­and move toward him.  He saw that being coming, coming, saw it detour to pass a prostrate body on the floor; always silent, but always coming, always drawing nearer.  He