For the first time the man slouching forward in the chair lifted his head.  Had a stranger looked in at that moment, curious to see him who had just committed homicide . . . or murder . . . he must have experienced a positive shock.  Sullen-eyed, sullen-lipped, the man-killer could not yet have seen the last of his teens.  A thin wisp of straw-colored hair across a low, atavistic forehead, unhealthy, yellowish skin, with pale, lack-lustre, faded blue eyes, he looked evil and vicious and cruel.  One looking from him to Jim Galloway would have suspected that one could be as inhuman as the other, but with the difference that that which was but means to an end with Galloway would be end in itself to Kid Rickard.  Something of the primal savage shone in the pale fires of his eyes.

“Yes,” retorted the Kid, his surly voice little better than a snarl.  “I got him and be damned to him!”

“Bad luck cursing a dead man, Rickard,” said Norton coldly.  “What did you kill him for?”

Kid Rickard’s tongue ran back and forth between his colorless lips before he replied.

“He tried to get me first,” he said defiantly.

“Who saw the shooting?”

“Jim Galloway.  And Antone.”

Rod Norton grunted his disgust with the situation.

“Give me your gun,” he commanded tersely.

The Kid frowned.  Galloway cleared his throat.  Rickard’s eyes went to him swiftly.  Then he got to his feet, jerked a thirty-eight-caliber revolver from the hip pocket of his overalls and held it out, surrendering it reluctantly.  Norton “broke” it, ejecting the cartridges into his palm.  Not an empty shell among them; the Kid had slipped in a fresh shell for every exploded one.

“How many times did you shoot?”

“I don’t know.  Two or three, I guess. . . .  Damn it, do you imagine a man counts ’em?”

“What were you and Galloway doing alone in here with the door locked?”

Galloway cut in sharply: 

“I didn’t want any more trouble; I was afraid somebody . . .”

“Shut up, will you?” cried the sheriff fiercely.  “I’ll give you all the chance you want to talk pretty soon.  Answer me, Rickard.”

“I told him to lock me up somewhere until you or Tom Cutter come,” said the Kid slowly.  “I was afraid somebody might jump me for what I done.  I didn’t want no more trouble.”

Norton turned briefly to the crowded room behind him.

“Anybody know where Cutter is?” he asked.

It appeared that every one knew.  Tom Cutter, Rod Norton’s deputy, had gone in the early morning to Mesa Verde, and would probably return in the cool of the evening.  Frowning, Norton made the best of the situation, and to gain his purpose called four men out of the crowd.

“I want you boys to do me a favor,” he said.

“Antone, come here.”

The short, squat half-breed standing behind the bar lifted his heavy black brows, demanding: