The main room of the saloon, into which the body had been brought from the back room, was a fog of smoke and a blabber of voices.  McFluke had not been idle at the bar, and the coroner’s jury was three parts drunk.  The members had not yet agreed on a verdict.  But the delay was a mere matter of form.  They always liked to stretch the time, and give the territory a good run for her money.

Racey Dawson, conscious that both Jack Harpe and Luke Tweezy were watching him covertly, rolled a meticulous cigarette.  He scratched a match on the chair seat, held it to the end of the cigarette, and stared across the pulsing flame straight into the eyes of the Marysville lawyer.  Tweezy’s gaze wavered and fell away.  Racey inhaled strongly, then got to his feet and lazed across to the bar where Jake Rule, with Kansas Casey at his elbow, was perfunctorily questioning McFluke.  The latter’s hard, close-coupled blue eyes narrowed at Racey’s approach.

Racey, as he draped himself against the bar, was careful to nudge Casey’s foot with a surreptitious toe.

“Jake,” said Racey, “would I be interruptin’ the proceedings too much if I made a motion for us to drink all round?”

“Not a-tall,” declared the sheriff, heartily.

Racey turned to McFluke.

When their hands had encircled the glasses for the third time, Racey, instead of drinking, suddenly looked across the bar at McFluke who was industriously swabbing the bar top.

“Mac,” he said, easily, “when that stranger ran out the door how many gents fired at him?”

“Punch Thompson,” replied McFluke, the sushing cloth stopping abruptly.  “You heard him tell the coroner how he fired and missed, didn’t you?”

“Oh, I heard, I heard,” Racey answered.  “No harm in asking again, is there?  Can’t be too shore about these here—­killin’s, can you?  Mac, which door did the stranger run through—­the one into the back room or the one leadin’ outdoors?”

“Why, the one leadin’ outdoors, of course.”  McFluke’s surprise at the question was evident.

“Jake,” said Racey, “s’pose now you ask Punch Thompson what the stranger was doing when he cut down on him.”

The sheriff regarded Racey with his keen gray gaze.  Then he faced about and singled out Thompson from a conversational group across the room.

“Punch,” he called, and then put Racey’s question in his own words.

“What was he doin’?” said Thompson, heedless of McFluke’s agonized expression.  “Which he was hoppin’ through that window there”—­here he indicated the middle one of three in the side of the room—­“when I drawed and missed.  I only had time for the one shot.”

At this there was a sudden scrabbling behind the bar.  It was McFluke trying to retreat through the doorway into the back room, and being prevented from accomplishing his purpose by Racey Dawson who, at the innkeeper’s first panic-stricken movement, had vaulted the bar and grabbed him by the neck.