Under the window he glanced in swiftly.  Chance had it that the cover was off of the little used billiard table and that two men, in shirt-sleeved comfort, were playing.  Both men he knew.  They were Charley Bedloe and his brother, the Kid.

The Bedloe boys were intent upon their game, the Kid laughing softly at a miscue Charley had made.  Charley was chalking his cue angrily and cursing his luck and neither of them glanced toward the window.  Thornton, drawing back a little so that he would not be seen did they happen to look his way, unfolded the paper Winifred had given him.

“Watch me play out my string, Charley!” he heard the Kid call banteringly.  Then he heard nothing more from the room, nothing to tell him of another man not ten steps from him in the darkness, for his whole mind had been caught by Winifred’s first words.

“I have wronged you from the beginning,” she had written.  “I thought that I had seen you that day on the trail behind me.  You denied it.  I thought that you were lying to me.  While you were out after the horses a man, masked, came into the cabin and robbed me of the five thousand dollars I was taking to Henry Pollard.  I thought that it was you!  The man was dressed as you were dressed, his grey handkerchief even was like yours.  Now I know it was a man named Ben Broderick who robbed me, and that he wanted me to think that it was you.

“Can’t you see the whole scheme?  Broderick and the men who are with him, have been committing these crimes.  And pretty soon, in a few days, in five days I think, they will be ready to make the evidence show that you are the man who has done it all.”

There was more; there were several sheets of paper, closely written.  Thornton saw the names of Henry Pollard, of Cole Dalton.  But he read no further.  In one instant the mind which had been so intent upon these things a girl’s writing was telling him forgot Winifred Waverly, Henry Pollard, Broderick—­everything except that which was happening at his side.

For, while he read, there had been the sharp crack of a revolver, he saw the spit of angry reddish flame almost at his side, and as he saw he dropped to his knee, Winifred’s note in his left hand, his right flashing to his own revolver.  For his first thought was that a man had crept up behind him, that it was Pollard, that he was shooting at him.

But almost with the flash and the report of the gun he knew that this man was not shooting at him.  There came the crash and tinkle of broken glass, one of the small panes of the window beside which Thornton had been reading dropped out, and almost before the falling pieces had ceased to rattle against the bare floor he heard the sound of running footsteps behind him.  The man who had fired had made sure with one shot.

Then Thornton heard the Kid cry out, his voice hoarse and inarticulate, and with the cry came a moan from Charley Bedloe.  Charley staggered half across the room, his two big hands going automatically to his hips.  He had come close to his younger brother, staring at him with wide eyes, and then slipped forward and down, quiet and limp and dead.