“A condition, you will observe, in which Mr. Barry will also be when he arrives,” remarked the doctor.

“Shaky?” grinned Buck Daniels.  “M’frien’, you don’t know that bird!” He sat up, clenching his fist.  “And if Dan does come, he can’t affo’d to press me too far!  I’ll take so much, and then——­”

He struck his fist on the arm of the chair.

“Buck!” cried Kate Cumberland.  “Are you mad?  Have you lost your reason?  Would you face him?”

Buck Daniels winced, but he then shook his head doggedly.

“He had his chance down in Brownsville,” he said.  “And he didn’t take it.  Why?  Because my back was turned?  Well, he could of got in front of me if he’d been terrible anxious.  I’ve seen Dan in action; he’s seen me in action!  Maybe he’s seen too much.  They’ve been stranger things than that, in this world!” He hitched his belt so that the butt of his revolver came farther forward.  But now Kate Cumberland advised:  “Buck, you’re tired out; you don’t know what you’re saying.  Better go up to bed.”

He flushed a ruddy bronze.

“D’you think I’m jest talkin’ words, Kate, to hear myself talk?”

“Listen!” broke in Joe Cumberland, and raised a bony forefinger for silence.

* * * * *

And the doctor noted a great change in the old man.  There was no longer a tremor in his body.  There was only a calm and smiling expectation—­a certainty.  A tinge of colour was in his withered face for the first time since Byrne had come to the ranch, and now the cattleman raised his finger with such an air of calm authority that at once every voice in the room was stilled.

“D’ye hear?”

They did not.  They heard only the faint rushing of the air through the window.  The flame danced in the chimney of the lamp and changed the faces in phantastic alteration.  One and all, they turned and faced the window.  Still there was not a sound audible, but the doctor felt as if the noise were approaching.  He knew it as surely as if he could see some far-off object moving near and nearer.  And he knew, as clearly, that the others in the room felt the same thing.  He turned his glance from the window towards Kate Cumberland.  Her face was upturned.  There was about it a transparent pallor; the eyes were large and darkly ringed; the lips parted into the saddest and the most patient of smiles; and the slender fingers were interwoven and pressed against the base of her throat.

For the first time he saw how the fire that was so manifest in the old man had been consuming her, also.  It left no mark of the coming of death upon her.  But it had burned her pure and left her transparent as crystal.  Pity swelled in the throat of Byrne as he realised the anguish of her long waiting.  Fear mingled with his pity.  He felt that something was coming which would seize on her as the wind seizes on the dead leaf, whirling her off into an infinity of storm and darkness into which he could not follow a single pace.