So much, in fact, that he let his knee protrude.  Wade fired, breaking that knee.  The rustler sagged in his tracks, his hip stuck out to afford a target for the remorseless Wade.  Still the doomed man did not cry out, though it was evident that he could not now keep his body from sagging into sight of the hunter.  Then with a desperate courage worthy of a better cause, and with a spirit great in its defeat, the rustler plunged out from his hiding-place, gun extended.  His red beard, his gaunt face, fierce and baleful, his wabbling plunge that was really a fall, made a sight which was terrible.  He hopped out of that fall.  His gun began to blaze.  But it only matched the blazes of Wade’s.  And the rustler pitched headlong over the framework, falling heavily against the wall beyond.

Then there was silence for a long moment.  Wade stirred, as if to look around.  Belllounds also stirred, and gulped, as if to breathe.  The three prostrate rustlers lay inert, their positions singularly tragic and settled.  The smoke again began to lift, to float out of the door and windows.  In another moment the big room seemed less hazy.

Wade rose, not without effort, and he had a gun in each hand.  Those hands were bloody; there was blood on his face, and his left shoulder was red.  He approached Belllounds.

Wade was terrible then—­terrible with a ruthlessness that was no pretense.  To Belllounds it must have represented death—­a bloody death which he was not prepared to meet.

“Come out of your trance, you pup rustler!” yelled Wade.

“For God’s sake, don’t kill me!” implored Belllounds, stricken with terror.

“Why not?  Look around!  My busy day, Buster!...  An’ for that Cap Folsom it’s been ten years comin’....  I’m goin’ to shoot you in the belly an’ watch you get sick to your stomach!”

Belllounds, with whisper, and hands, and face, begged for his life in an abjectness of sheer panic.

“What!” roared the hunter.  “Didn’t you know I come to kill you?”

“Yes—­yes!  I’ve seen—­that.  It’s awful!...  I never harmed you....  Don’t kill me!  Let me live, Wade.  I swear to God I’ll—­I’ll never do it again....  For dad’s sake—­for Collie’s sake—­don’t kill me!”

“I’m Hell-Bent Wade!...  You wouldn’t listen to them—­when they wanted to tell you who I am!”

Every word of Wade’s drove home to this boy the primal meaning of sudden death.  It inspired him with an unutterable fear.  That was what clamped his brow in a sweaty band and upreared his hair and rolled his eyeballs.  His magnified intelligence, almost ghastly, grasped a hope in Wade’s apparent vacillation and in the utterance of the name of Columbine.  Intuition, a subtle sense, inspired him to beg in that name.

“Swear you’ll give up Collie!” demanded Wade, brandishing his guns with bloody hands.

“Yes—­yes!  My God, I’ll do anything!” moaned Belllounds.

“Swear you’ll tell your father you’d had a change of heart.  You’ll give Collie up!...  Let Moore have her!”