The wind swept through the open door with fresh fury.  Here a lamp went out, there the unsteady flame of a candle was extinguished.  The smoke from the shotgun was mingled with much wood smoke whipped out of the fireplace.  The man in the doorway, neither hesitating nor hurrying, eminently cool and confident, came into the room.  The girl studied him curiously, marking each trifling detail of his costume:  the shaggy black chaps like those of a cowboy off for a gay holiday; the soft grey shirt and silk handkerchief to match knotted loosely about a brown throat.  He was very tall and wore boots with tall heels; his black hat had a crown which added to the impression of great height.  To the fascinated eyes of the girl he appeared little less than a giant.

He stopped and for a moment remained tensely, watchfully still.  She felt his eyes on her; she could not see them in the shadow of his hat, but had an unpleasant sensation of a pair of sinister eyes narrowing in their keen regard of her.  She shivered as though cold.

Moving again he made his away along the wall and to the bar.  He stepped behind it, still with neither hesitation nor haste, and found the two mail bags with his feet.  And with his feet he pushed them out to the open, along the wall, toward the door.  Hap Smith snarled; his face no longer one of broad good humour.  The shotgun barrel bore upon him steadily, warningly.  Hap’s rising hand dropped again.

Then suddenly all was uproar and confusion, those who had been chained to their chairs or places on the floor springing into action.  The man had backed to the door, swept up the mail bags and now suddenly leaped backward into the outside night.  Hap Smith and four or five other men had drawn their guns and were firing after him.  There were outcries, above them surging the curses of the stage driver.  Bert Stone was moaning on the floor.  The girl wanted to go to him but for a little merely regarded him with wide eyes; there was a spreading pool on the bare floor at his side, looking in the uncertain light like spilled ink.  A thud of bare feet, and Ma Drury came running into the room, her night dress flying after her.

“Pa!” she cried wildly.  “You ain’t killed, are you, Pa?”

“Bert is, most likely,” he answered, swinging across the room to the fallen man.  Then it was that the girl by the fire sprang to her feet and ran to Bert Stone’s side.

“Who was it?  What happened?” Ma Drury asked shrilly.

The men looked from one to another of their set-faced crowd.  Getting only silence for her answer Ma Drury with characteristic irritation demanded again to be told full particulars and in the same breath ordered the door shut.  A tardy squeal and another like an echo came from the room which harboured Lew Yates’s wife and mother-in-law.  Perhaps they had just come out from under the covers for air and squealed and dived back again ... not being used to the customs obtaining in the vicinity of Drury’s road house as Poke himself had remarked.