There was a round chorus of oaths and exclamations.  “The poisonous little skunk!  It’s him!  We’ll string him up!”

With a rush they started for the door.

“Wait!” called Riley Sinclair.

Bill Sandersen watched him with a keen eye.  He had studied the face of the big man from up north all during the scene, and he found the stern features unreadable.  For one instant now he guessed that Sinclair was about to confess.

“If you don’t mind seven in one party,” said Riley Sinclair, “I think I’ll go along to see justice done.  You see, I got a sort of secondhand interest in this necktie party.”

Mason clapped him on the shoulder.  “You’re just the sort of a gent we need,” he declared.

6

Down in the kitchen they demanded a loaf of bread and some coffee from the Chinese cook, and then the seven dealers of justice took horse and turned into the silence of the long mountain trail.

The sunrise had picked those mountains out of the night, directly above Sour Creek.  Riley Sinclair regarded them with a longing eye.  That was his country.  A man could see up there, and he could see the truth.  Down here in the valley everything was askew.  Men lived blindly and did blind things, like this “justice” which the six riders were bringing on an innocent man.

Not by any means had Riley decided what he would do.  If he confessed the truth he would not only have a man-sized job trying to escape from the posse, but he would have to flee before he had a chance to deal finally with Sandersen.  Chiefly he wanted time.  He wanted a chance to study Sandersen.  The fellow had spoken for him like a man, but Sinclair was suspicious.

In his quandary he turned to sad-faced Montana and asked:  “Who’s this gent you call Cold Feet?”

“He’s a tenderfoot,” declared Montana, “and he’s queer.  He’s yaller, they say, and that’s why they call him Cold Feet.  Besides, he teaches the school.  Where’s they a real man that would do a schoolma’am’s work?  Living or dying, he ain’t much good.  You can lay to that!”

Sinclair was comforted by this speech.  Perhaps the schoolteacher was, as Montana stated, not much good, dead or alive.  Sinclair had known many men whose lives were not worth an ounce of powder.  In this case he would let Cold Feet be hanged.  It was a conclusion sufficiently grim, but Riley Sinclair was admittedly a grim man.  He had lived for himself, he had worked for himself.  On his younger brother, Hal, he had wasted all the better and tenderer side of his nature.  For Hal’s education and advantage he had sweated and saved for a long time.  With the death of Hal, the better side of Riley Sinclair died.

The horses sweated up a rise of ground.

“For a schoolteacher he lives sort of far out of town, I figure,” said Riley Sinclair.

“That’s on account of Sally Bent,” answered Denver Jim.  “Sally and her brother got a shack out this way, and Cold Feet boards with ’em.”