Bill stood while the rest of that grim procession passed his place.  There was another, a young fellow who looked ready to cry, walking unsteadily behind Jack, both his arms gripped by others of the Vigilance Committee.  There were two crude stretchers, borne by stolid-faced miners in red flannel shirts and clay-stained boots.  On the first a dead man lay grinning up at the sun, his teeth just showing under his bushy mustache, a trickle of red running down from his temple.  On the next a man groaned and mumbled blasphemy between his groanings.

Bill took it all in, a single glance for each,—­a glance trained by gambling to see a great deal between the flicker of his lashes.  He did not seem to look once at the Captain, yet he knew that Jack’s ivory-handled pistols hung at the Captain’s rocking hips as he went striding past; and he knew that malice lurked under the grizzled hair which hid the Captain’s cruel lips; and that satisfaction glowed in the hard, sidelong glance he gave his prisoner.

He stood until he saw Jack duck his head under the tent flaps of the jail and the white-faced youth follow shrinking after.  He stood while the armed guards took up their stations on the four sides of the tent and began pacing up and down the paths worn deep in tragic significance.  He saw the wounded man carried into Pete’s place across the way, and the dead man taken farther down the street.  He saw the crowd split into uneasy groups which spoke a common tongue, that they might exchange unasked opinions upon this, the biggest sensation since Sandy left town with his ankles tied under the vicious-eyed buckskin whose riders rode always toward the west and whose saddle was always empty when he came back to his stall at the end of the town.  Bill saw it all, to the last detail; but after his one explosive oath, he was apparently the most indifferent of them all.

When the Captain ended his curt instructions to the guard and came towards him, Bill showed a disposition to speak.

“Who’s the kid?” he drawled companionably, while his fingers itched upon the hammer, and the soul of him lusted for sight of the hole it could make in the skull of the Captain.  “I don’t recollect seeing him around town—­and there ain’t many faces I forget, either.”

The Captain shot him a surprised look that was an unconscious tribute to Bill’s diplomatic art.  But Bill’s level glance would have disarmed a keener man than Tom Perkins.

Perkins stopped.  “Stranger, from what he said—­though I’ve got my doubts.  Some crony of Allen’s, I expect.  It was him done the shooting; the kid didn’t have any gun on him.  Allen didn’t deny it, either.”

“No—­he’s just bull-headed enough to tough it out,” commented Bill.  “What was the row about—­do yuh know?”

Perkins stiffened.  “That,” he said with some dignity, “will come out at the trial.  He killed Rawhide outright, and Texas Bill will die, I reckon.  The trial will show what kinda excuse he thought he had.”  Having delivered himself, thus impartially and with malice towards none, Perkins started on.