All doubt was gone now.  Lowrie and Quade were both gone; and he, Sandersen, alone remained, the third and last of the guilty.  His first strong impulse, after his agitation had diminished to such a point that he was able to think clearly again, was to flee headlong into the night and keep on, changing horses at every town he reached until he was over the mountains and buried in the shifting masses of life in some great city.

And then he recalled Riley Sinclair, lean and long as a hound.  Such a man would be terrible on the trail—­tireless, certainly.  Besides there was the horror of flight, almost more awful than the immediate fear of death.  Once he turned his back to flee from Riley Sinclair, the gunfighter would become a nightmare that would haunt him the rest of his life.  No matter where he fled, every footstep behind him would be the footfall of Riley Sinclair, and behind every closed door would stand the same ominous figure.  On the other hand if he went back and faced Sinclair he might reduce the nightmare to a mere creature of flesh and blood.

Sandersen resolved to take the second step.

In one way his hands were tied.  He could not accuse Sinclair of this killing without in the first place exposing the tale of how Riley’s brother was abandoned in the desert by three strong men who had been his bunkies.  And that story, Sandersen knew, would condemn him to worse than death in the mountain desert.  He would be loathed and scorned from one end of the cattle country to the other.

All of these things went through his head, as he jogged his mustang back down the hill.  He turned in at Mason’s place.  All at once he recalled that he was not acting normally.  He had just come from seeing the dead body of his best friend.  And yet so mortal was his concern for his own safety that he felt not the slightest touch of grief or horror for dead Quade.

He had literally to grip his hands and rouse himself to a pitch of semihysteria.  Then he spurred his horse down the path, flung himself with a shout out of the saddle, cast open the door of the house without a preliminary knock, and rushed into the room.

“Murder!” shouted Bill Sandersen.  “Quade is killed!”

5

Who killed Quade?  That was the question asked with the quiet deadliness by six men in Sour Creek.  It had been Buck Mason’s idea to keep the whole affair still.  It was very possible that the slayer was still in the environs of Sour Creek, and in that case much noise would simply serve to frighten him away.  It was also Buck’s idea that they should gather a few known men to weigh the situation.