The doctor made up some powders.  “One every two hours till he gets to sleep.  I’ll come and see him in the morning.  You’re at the Proctor House, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Is Roush goin’ to live?” asked Jim.

The professional man looked at the boy speculatively.  He wondered whether the young fellow was suffering qualms of conscience.  Since he did not believe in the indiscriminate shooting in vogue on the frontier, he was willing this youngster should worry a bit.

“Not one chance for him in a hundred,” he replied brusquely.

“That’s good.  I’d hate to have to do it all over again.  Have you got the makin’s with you, Billie?” Clanton asked evenly.

“I’ve got a plain and simple word for such killings,” the doctor said, flushing.  “I find it in my Bible.”

“That’s where my dad found it too, doctor.”

With which cryptic utterance Clanton led the way out of the office to the hotel.

Jimmie lay down dressed on the bed of their joint room while his friend went down to the porch to announce to sundry loafers, from whom the news would spread over town shortly, that Clanton had gone to sleep and was on no account to be disturbed till morning.

Later in the afternoon Billie might have been seen fixing a stirrup leather for Bud Proctor, the fourteen-year-old heir of the hotel proprietor.  He and the youngster appeared to be having a bully time on the porch, but it was noticeable that the cowpuncher, for all his manner of casual carelessness, sat close to the wall in the angle of an L so that nobody could approach him unobserved.

In an admiring trance Bud had followed the two friends from the office of the doctor.  Now he was in the seventh heaven at being taken into friendship by one of these heroes.  At last he screwed up his courage to refer to the affair at Tolleson’s.

“Say, Daniel Boone ain’t got a thing on yore friend, has he?  Jiminy, I’d like to go with you both when you leave town.”

Billie spoke severely.  “Get that notion right out of your haid, Bud.  You’re goin’ to stay right here at home.  I’ll tell you another thing while we’re on that subject.  Don’t you get to thinkin’ that killers are fine people.  They ain’t.  Some of ’em aren’t even game.  They take all kinds of advantage an’ they’re a cruel, cold-blooded lot.  Never forget that.  I’m not talkin’ about Jim Clanton, understand.  He did what he thought he had to do.  I don’t say he was right.  I don’t say he was wrong.  But I will say that this country would be a whole lot better off if we’d all put our guns away.”

Bud sniffed.  “If you hadn’t had yore guns this mornin’ I’d like to know where you’d ‘a’ been.”

“True enough.  I can’t travel unarmed because of Indians an’ bad men.  What I say is that some day we’ll all be brave enough to go without our hog-legs.  I’ll be glad when that day comes.”

“An’ when you two went up Escondido Canon after the Mescaleros that had captured Miss Roubideau?  I heard Dad Wrayburn tellin’ all about it at supper here one night.  Well, what if you hadn’t had any guns?” persisted Bud.