“Come outside, alone.  A word for you—­from your Masked Rider!”

Oldring kicked a chair out of his way and lunged forward with a stamp of heavy boot that jarred the floor.  He waved down his muttering, rising men.

Venters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound had ever before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of the rustler.

Oldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his high-top boots with gold spurs.  In that moment Venters had a strange, unintelligible curiosity to see Oldring alive.  The rustler’s broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard, as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonderfully charged with vitality and force and strength, seemed to afford Venters an unutterable fiendish joy because for that magnificent manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.

“Oldring, Bess is alive!  But she’s dead to you—­dead to the life you made her lead—­dead as you will be in one second!”

Swift as lightning Venters’s glance dropped from Oldring’s rolling eyes to his hands.  One of them, the right, swept out, then toward his gun—­and Venters shot him through the heart.

Slowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the gun, fell away.  Venters’s strangely acute faculties grasped the meaning of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and heave, of the quivering beard.  But was that awful spirit in the black eyes only one of vitality?

“Man—­why—­didn’t—­you—­wait?  Bess—­was—­” Oldring’s whisper died under his beard, and with a heavy lurch he fell forward.

Bounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and garden to the sage.  Here, under cover of the tall brush, he turned west and ran on to the place where he had hidden his rifle.  Securing that, he again set out into a run, and, circling through the sage, came up behind Jane Withersteen’s stable and corrals.  With laboring, dripping chest, and pain as of a knife thrust in his side, he stopped to regain his breath, and while resting his eyes roved around in search of a horse.  Doors and windows of the stable were open wide and had a deserted look.  One dejected, lonely burro stood in the near corral.  Strange indeed was the silence brooding over the once happy, noisy home of Jane Withersteen’s pets.

He went into the corral, exercising care to leave no tracks, and led the burro to the watering-trough.  Venters, though not thirsty, drank till he could drink no more.  Then, leading the burro over hard ground, he struck into the sage and down the slope.

He strode swiftly, turning from time to time to scan the slope for riders.  His head just topped the level of sage-brush, and the burro could not have been seen at all.  Slowly the green of Cottonwoods sank behind the slope, and at last a wavering line of purple sage met the blue of sky.