Here sat Dan Armstrong playing his cheerful game, laughing and jesting, because forsooth he was the winner.  And there, on the opposite side of the table, sat Pete Reeve, the guest in the house of his host, growing darker and darker as the money was transferred from his pocket to the pocket of the jovial Armstrong.  Then, a sudden taking of offense at some harmless jest, the cold flash of steel as Reeve leaned and jumped to his feet, and then the explosion of the revolver, with Armstrong settling slowly, limply forward on the table.  There he lay with a stream pouring across the table from the death wound, his helpless arms outstretched on the wood.

Then Reeve, panic-stricken, perhaps with a sudden stirring of remorse, started for the door, struck the box on his way, smashing it to bits, and as soon as he got outside, leaped for his horse.  Luckily retribution had overtaken the murderer in the very moment of escape.  Bull Hunter sighed.  Never had the strength of the arm of the law been so vividly brought home to him as by this incident.  Suppose that he had fulfilled his purpose and killed Reeve?  Would not the law have reached for him in the same fashion and taken and crushed him?

He shuddered, and looking up from his broodings, he glanced through the opposite window and saw that the woods were growing dark in that direction.  Night was approaching, and, with the feeling of night, there was a ghostly sense of death, as though the spirit of the dead man were returning to his old home.  On the other side of the house, however, the woods showed brighter.  This was the east window—­the east window through which Reeve declared that the shot had been fired.

Bull shook his head.  He stepped out of the cabin and looked about.  It was a prosperous little stretch of meadow, cleared into the cottonwoods and reclaiming part of the marshland—­all very rich soil, as one could see at a glance.  There was a field which had been recently upturned by the plow, perhaps the work of yesterday.  The furrows were still black, still not dried out by the sun.  Today would have been the time for harrowing, but that work was indefinitely postponed by the grim visitor.  No doubt this Armstrong was an industrious man.  The sense of a wasted life was brought home to Bull; a bullet had ended it all!

Absent-mindedly he passed around the side of the house and started for the east window through which Reeve had said that the bullet was fired, but he shook his head at once.

On the east side the house leaned against a mass of white stone.  It rose high, rough, ragged.  Certainly a man stalking a house to fire a shot would never come up to it from this side!  His own words were convicting Reeve of the murder!

Still he continued to clamber over the stones until he stood by the window.  To be sure, if a man stood there, he could easily have fired into the room and into the breast of a man sitting on the far side of the table.  Armstrong was found there.  Bull looked down to his feet as a thoughtful man will do, and there, very clearly marked against the white of the stone, he saw a dark streak—­two of them, side by side.