In any other locality a shot would have brought on the run every man who heard it; but in a “cow-town,” especially on a dance night, shots are as common as shouts.  In Hardup that night there had been periodical outbursts which no one, not even the women, minded in the least.

So it was not until Billy opened the door, put his head in, and cried:  “Come alive!  A fellow’s been shot, right out here,” that there was a stampede for the door.

The Pilgrim still stood beside the other, waiting.  Three or four stooped over the man on the ground.  Billy was one of them.

“He pulled a gun on me,” explained the Pilgrim.  “I was trying to take it away from him, and it went off.”

Billy stood up, and, as he did so, his foot struck against a revolver lying beside the Swede.  He looked at the Pilgrim queerly, but he did not say anything.  They were lifting the Swede to carry him into the office; they knew that he was dead, even before they got him into the light.

“Somebody better get word to the coroner,” said the Pilgrim, fighting for self-control.  “It was self-defense.  My God, boys, I couldn’t help it!  He pulled a gun on me.  Yuh saw it on the ground there, right where he dropped it.”

Billy turned clear around and looked again at the Pilgrim, and the Pilgrim met his eyes defiantly before he turned away.

“I understood yuh to say it was a knife,” he remarked slowly.

The Pilgrim swung back again.  “I didn’t—­or, if I did, I was rattled.  It was a gun—­that gun on the ground.  He met me there and started a row and said he’d fix me.  He pulled his gun, and I made a grab for it and it went off.  That’s all there is to it.”  He stared hard at Billy.

There was much talk among the men, and several told how they had heard the Swede “cussing” Walland in the saloon that evening.  Some remembered threats—­the threats which a man will foolishly make when he is pouring whisky down his throat by the glassful.  No one seemed to blame Walland in the least, and Billy felt that the Pilgrim was in a fair way to become something of a hero.  It is not every man who has the nerve to grab a gun with which he is threatened.

They made a cursory search of the Pilgrim and found that he was not armed, and he was given to understand that he would be expected to stay around town until the coroner came and “sat” on the case.  But he was treated to drinks right and left, and when Billy went to find Flora the Pilgrim was leaning heavily upon the bar with a glass in his hand and his hat far back on his head, declaiming to the crowd that he was perfectly harmless so long as he was left alone.  But he wasn’t safe to monkey with, and any man who came at him hunting trouble would sure get all he wanted and then some.  He said he didn’t kill people if he could help it—­but a man was plumb obliged to, sometimes.

“I’m sure surprised to think I got off with m’ life, last winter, when I hazed him away from line-camp; I guess I must uh had a close call, all right!” Billy snorted contemptuously and shut the door upon the wordy revelation of the Pilgrim’s deep inner nature which had been until that night carefully hidden from an admiring world.