“Pollard?” asked the cowboy quickly.

“No.  Not Pollard.”

“Then Broderick?”

“Not Broderick.”

“Bedloe?...  The Kid?”

“What does his name matter?  I’ll give him a dozen names when the time comes, and by heaven he’s got a crime to pay for for every name he ever wore!”

He grew suddenly silent and sat staring out through the open door at the distant mountains.  At last he turned back toward Thornton, his eyes very clear, his expression placid.

“Guess why they are waiting five days more before springing their mine?” he asked abruptly.

“Yes.  I figured it out a little while ago, after I found the truck in my loft.  In five days it’ll be the first of the month.  On the first of the month the stage from the Rock Creek Mines will be worth holding up.  It carried in ten thousand dollars last month.  At times, there has been a lot more.  Just as sure as a hen lays eggs, it is due to be robbed on the first; they’ll find something here to prove I was the hold up man, and I....”

“And you go over the road for life or take a drop at the end of a rope?  And they quit being badmen and buy ranches?  That it?”

“That’s it.  It’s a gamble, but....”

“But it’s a damned good gamble,” laughed Comstock softly.  “You ought to be sheriff, Buck.”

But Buck, thinking of how blind to all this he had been so long, how not even now would he have his eyes open were it not for a girl, longed with an intense longing for the end of this thing when she might be free to go from the house of a man like Henry Pollard, when he might be free to go to her and...

“How does it happen,” he asked suddenly, “that you are not after Jimmie Clayton?”

“When I’m out for a big grizzily,” returned Comstock, “I can’t waste my time on little brown bears!  That’s one thing.  Another is that Jimmie Clayton never had a chance of getting away.  If he lives ten days he’ll be nabbed, and he won’t live ten days.  He’s shot to pieces and he’s sick on top of it.  I told you last night the poor devil is a fool and a tool rather than a real badman.  If he’s got a chance to die quietly, why let him die outside of jail.  It’s all one in the end.”

Thornton had always felt a sort of pity for Jimmie Clayton; it had always seemed to him that the poor devil was merely one of the weaker vessels that go down the stream of life, borne this way and that by the current that sweeps them on, with little enough chance from the beginning, having come warped and misshapen from the hands of the potter.  And now Jimmie was about to die.  Well, whether it had been Jimmie Clayton or another who had shot him that night down in Texas, he would heed the entreaty of the letter and go to him for the last time.

So that night, when darkness came, Thornton left Comstock at the cabin and rode out towards the mountains, towards the Poison Hole and the dugout at its side.