Thornton’s one first emotion, one so natural to a man who takes his fight in the open, was a boundless rage toward the man who had murdered another man in this cold blooded fashion, taking his grim toll from the darkness and without warning.  He whirled about, his own gun blazing in his hand, and as fast as his finger could work the trigger sent six shots after the flying footsteps.

The footsteps were gone.  Again the cowboy looked swiftly in at the window.  He saw that Charley Bedloe was dead; the Kid, his face contorted, hideously twisted to his blended rage and grief, stood staring about him helplessly.  Then, the moment of paralysis gone, the Kid suddenly leaped over his brother’s body and ran to the window.

“It’s Buck Thornton!” roared the Kid.  Both of his big guns were already in his hands.  “Take that, you....”

Then Buck Thornton, making most of an unforeseen situation, did a thing that he had never done before in his life, which he never would do again.  He turned and ran, stumbling through the darkness into which one leap carried him.

For he knew that the Kid had no shadow of a shred of doubt that he had killed Charley Bedloe, he knew that if he did not run for it, run like a scared rabbit now, why then he’d have to kill the Kid or the Kid would kill him.  He had no wish to meet his death for the cowardly act of another man and he had no wish to kill Kid Bedloe because another man had murdered his brother.  If there were anything left to him but to run for it, he did not know what it was.

He found his horse, leaped into the saddle and turned out toward the north.

“The Kid sure had his nerve, running right up to the window after Charley dropped,” he muttered, with the abrupt beginning of the first bit of admiration he had ever felt for a man whom he had appraised as even lower in the scale than “Rattlesnake” Pollard.  “The boy is game!  And now he’s going to come out after me, and there won’t be any talking done and it’s going to be Kid Bedloe or me.  And,” with much certainty, but with a little sigh, half regretful, “the Kid is just a shade slow on the draw.  Sure as two and two I’ve got to kill him.  Oh, hell,” he concluded disgustedly.  “Why did this have to happen?  Haven’t I got enough on my hands already?”

CHAPTER XXVI

THE FRAME-UP

Thornton returned to his cabin long before the first faint streak of daylight, and not once during the night did he think of sleep.  At his little table in the light of his coal-oil lamp he read over and over the hurried words which Winifred Waverly had been driven to put on paper for him.  At first his look was merely charged with perplexity; then there came into it incredulity and finally sheer amazement.

“The pack of hounds!” he cried softly when he had done, his fist striking hard upon his table.  “The pack of low down, dirty hounds!”