Hap Smith was the first one of the men who had dashed outside to return.  He carried a mail bag in each hand, muddy and wet, having stumbled over them in the wild chase.  He dropped them to the floor and stared angrily at them.

The bulky mail bag, save for the damp and mud, was untouched.  The lean bag however had been slit open.  Hap Smith kicked it in a sudden access of rage.

“There was ten thousan’ dollars in there, in green backs,” he said heavily.  “They trusted it to me an’ Bert Stone to get across with it.  An’ now ...”

His face was puckered with rage and shame.  He went slowly to where Bert Stone lay.  His friend was white and unconscious ... perhaps already his tale was told.  Hap Smith looked from him to the girl who, her face as white as Bert’s, was trying to staunch the flow of blood.

“I said it,” he muttered lugubriously; “the devil’s own night.”

CHAPTER III

BUCK THORNTON, MAN’S MAN

Those who had rushed into the outer darkness in the wake of the highwayman returned presently.  Mere impulse and swift natural reaction from their former enforced inactivity rather than any hope of success had sent them hot-foot on the pursuit.  The noisy, windy night, the absolute dark, obviated all possibility of coming up with him.  Grumbling and theorising, they returned to the room and closed the door behind them.

Now that the tense moment of the actual robbery had passed there was a general buzzing talk, voices lifted in surmise, a lively excitement replacing the cosy quiet of a few moments ago.  Voices from the spare bed room urged Ma Drury to bring an account of the adventure, and Poke’s wife, having first escorted the wounded man to her own bed and donned a wrapper and shoes and stockings, gave to Lew Yates’s women folk as circumstantial a description of the whole affair as though she herself had witnessed it.

After a while a man here and there began to eat, taking a slab of bread and meat in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other, walking back and forth and talking thickly.  The girl at the fireplace sat stiff and still, staring at the flames; she had lost her appetite, had quite forgotten it in fact.  At first from under the hand shading her eyes she watched the men going for one drink after another, the strong drink of the frontier; but after a little, as though this had been a novel sight in the beginning but soon lost interest for her, she let her look droop to the fire.  Fresh dry fuel had been piled on the back log and at last a grateful sense of warmth and sleepiness pervaded her being.  She no longer felt hunger; she was too tired, her eyelids had grown too heavy for her to harbour the thought of food.  She settled forward in her chair and nodded.  The talk of the men, though as they ate and drank their voices were lifted, grew fainter and fainter in her ears, further and further away.  Finally they were blended in an indistinguishable murmur that meant nothing....  In a doze she caught herself wondering if the wounded man in the next room would live.  It was terribly still in there.