They passed in a tangled swirl, and their dust coiled up thick from the dark ground and luminously unfolded across the glare of the sharp-halted locomotive.  Then they wheeled, and clustered around it where it stood by our cars, its air-brake pumping deep breaths, and the internal steam humming through its bowels; and I came out in time to see Billy Lusk climb its front with callow, enterprising shouts.  That was child’s play; and the universal yell now raised by the horsemen was their child’s play too; but the whole thing could so precipitately reel into the fatal that my thoughts stopped.  I could only look when I saw that they had somehow recognized the man on the engine for a sheriff.  Two had sprung from their horses and were making boisterously toward the cab, while Lin McLean, neither boisterous nor joking, was going to the cab from my side, with his pistol drawn, to keep the peace.  The engineer sat with a neutral hand on the lever, the fireman had run along the top of the coal in the tender and descended and crouched somewhere, and the sheriff, cool, and with a good-natured eye upon all parties, was just beginning to explain his errand, when some rider from the crowd cut him short with an invitation to get down and have a drink.  At the word of ribald endearment by which he named the sheriff, a passing fierceness hardened the officer’s face, and the new yell they gave was less playful.  Waiting no more explanations, they swarmed against the locomotive, and McLean pulled himself up on the step.  The loud talking fell at a stroke to let business go on, and in this silence came the noise of a sliding-door.  At that I looked, and they all looked, and stood harmless, like children surprised.  For there on the threshold of the freight-car, with the interior darkness behind her, and touched by the headlight’s diverging rays, stood Jessamine Buckner.

“Will you gentlemen do me a favor?” said she.  “Strangers, maybe, have no right to ask favors, but I reckon you’ll let that pass this time.  For I’m real sleepy!” She smiled as she brought this out.  “I’ve been four days and nights on the cars, and to-morrow I’ve got to stage to Buffalo.  You see I’ll not be here to spoil your fun to-morrow night, and I want boys to be boys just as much as ever they can.  Won’t you put it off till to-morrow night?”

In their amazement they found no spokesman; but I saw Lin busy among them, and that some word was passing through their groups.  After the brief interval of stand-still they began silently to get on their horses, while the looming engine glowed and pumped its breath, and the sheriff and engineer remained as they were.

“Good-night, lady,” said a voice among the moving horsemen, but the others kept their abashed native silence; and thus they slowly filed away to the corrals.  The figures, in their loose shirts and leathern chaps, passed from the dimness for a moment through the cone of light in front of the locomotive, so that the metal about them made here and there a faint, vanishing glint; and here and there in the departing column a bold, half-laughing face turned for a look at the girl in the doorway, and then was gone again into the dimness.