Again he listened.  No sound broke the stillness of the night.  The silence got on his nerves.  He took another big drink and decided it was time to go.

He blew out the light and once more listened.  The lifeless body of his ally lying within touch of his foot did not disturb the outlaw.  He had not killed him, and if he had it would have made no difference.  Very softly for a large man, he passed to the inner room and toward the back door.  He deflected his course to a cupboard where he knew Steelman kept liquor and from a shelf helped himself to an unbroken quart bottle of bourbon.  He knew himself well enough to know that during the next twenty-four hours he would want whiskey badly.

Slowly he unlocked and opened the back door.  His eyes searched the yard and the open beyond to make sure that neither his enemy nor a sheriff’s posse was lurking in the brush for him.  He crept out to the stable, revolver in hand.  Here he saddled in the dark, deftly and rapidly, thrusting the bottle of whiskey into one of the pockets of the saddlebags.  Leading the horse out into the mesquite, he swung to the saddle and rode away.

He was still in the saddle when the peaks above caught the morning sun glow in a shaft of golden light.  Far up in the gulches the new fallen snow reflected the dawn’s pink.

In a pocket of the hills Doble unsaddled.  He hobbled his horse and turned it loose to graze while he lay down under a pine with the bottle for a companion.

The man had always had a difficult temper.  This had grown on him and been responsible largely for his decline in life.  It had been no part of his plan to “go bad.”  There had been a time when he had been headed for success in the community.  He had held men’s respect, even though they had not liked him.  Then, somehow, he had turned the wrong corner and been unable to retrace his steps.

He could even put a finger on the time he had commenced to slip.  It had begun when he had quarreled with Emerson Crawford about his daughter Joyce.  Shorty and he had done some brand-burning through a wet blanket.  But he had not gone so far that a return to respectability was impossible.  A little rustling on the quiet, with no evidence to fasten it on one, was nothing to bar a man from society.  He had gone more definitely wrong after Sanders came back to Malapi.  The young ex-convict, he chose to think, was responsible for the circumstances that made of him an outlaw.  Crawford and Sanders together had exposed him and driven him from the haunts of men to the hills.  He hated them both with a bitter, morose virulence his soul could not escape.

Throughout the day he continued to drink.  This gave him no refuge from himself.  He still brooded in the inferno of his own thought-circle.  It is possible that a touch of madness had begun to affect his brain.  Certainly his subsequent actions would seem to bear out this theory.