“Judkins, you’re a good fellow,” interrupted Venters.  “Some day I’ll tell you a story.  I’ve no time now.  Take the horses to Jane.”

Judkins stared, and then, muttering to himself, he mounted Bells, and stared again at Venters, and then, leading the other horses, he rode into the grove and disappeared.

Once, long before, on the night Venters had carried Bess through the canyon and up into Surprise Valley, he had experienced the strangeness of faculties singularly, tinglingly acute.  And now the same sensation recurred.  But it was different in that he felt cold, frozen, mechanical incapable of free thought, and all about him seemed unreal, aloof, remote.  He hid his rifle in the sage, marking its exact location with extreme care.  Then he faced down the lane and strode toward the center of the village.  Perceptions flashed upon him, the faint, cold touch of the breeze, a cold, silvery tinkle of flowing water, a cold sun shining out of a cold sky, song of birds and laugh of children, coldly distant.  Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven.  Colder and tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his hands as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low to his gun-sheaths.  Men meeting him in the walk gave him wide berth.  In front of Bevin’s store a crowd melted apart for his passage, and their faces and whispers were faces and whispers of a dream.  He turned a corner to meet Tull face to face, eye to eye.  As once before he had seen this man pale to a ghastly, livid white so again he saw the change.  Tull stopped in his tracks, with right hand raised and shaking.  Suddenly it dropped, and he seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters’s sight.  Next he saw many horses with bridles down—­all clean-limbed, dark bays or blacks—­rustlers’ horses!  Loud voices and boisterous laughter, rattle of dice and scrape of chair and clink of gold, burst in mingled din from an open doorway.  He stepped inside.

With the sight of smoke-hazed room and drinking, cursing, gambling, dark-visaged men, reality once more dawned upon Venters.

His entrance had been unnoticed, and he bent his gaze upon the drinkers at the bar.  Dark-clothed, dark-faced men they all were, burned by the sun, bow-legged as were most riders of the sage, but neither lean nor gaunt.  Then Venters’s gaze passed to the tables, and swiftly it swept over the hard-featured gamesters, to alight upon the huge, shaggy, black head of the rustler chief.

“Oldring!” he cried, and to him his voice seemed to split a bell in his ears.

It stilled the din.

That silence suddenly broke to the scrape and crash of Oldring’s chair as he rose; and then, while he passed, a great gloomy figure, again the thronged room stilled in silence yet deeper.

“Oldring, a word with you!” continued Venters.

“Ho!  What’s this?” boomed Oldring, in frowning scrutiny.