“I wish you’d seen that man’s eyes!  Then you’d know what I mean when I say he gets hard, hard an’ bitter sometimes.  An’ his voice—­it was so low an’ soft you might ‘a’ thought he was putting a baby to sleep with it!  There was two of them boys, big an’ ugly-mean, an’ they both had guns on, in sight.  There was jus’ one of Buck Thornton, an’ I didn’t know yet he ever toted a gun.  He uses his hands, mostly, I reckon, Buck does.  He didn’t say much.  He just got them two hands of his on Charley Bedloe’s neck, an’ I thought he was goin’ to break it sure.  An’ Charley got flung clean out in the yard before the Kid had finished going for his gun!  You wouldn’t believe a man could be that quick.

“Quick?  It wasn’t nothin’ to his next play.  I tell you the Kid’s hand was on the way to his gun an’ Buck didn’t have a gun on him, you’d have said.  An’ then he did have a gun, an’ John an’ me didn’t even see where he got it, an’ he didn’t seem to be in a hurry, an’ he’d shot before the Kid could more’n pull his gun up!”

“He killed him?”

“He could have killed him just as easy as a man rolls a cigareet!  There wasn’t six feet between ’em.  Only men like Buck Thornton don’t kill men unless they got to, I guess.  But he shot the Kid in the arm, takin’ them chances as cool as an icicle; an’ when the Kid dropped his gun an’ then grabbed at it with his other hand, Buck shot him in the left arm the same way.  An’ then, using his hands, he threw him out.  An’ I don’t believe Charley Bedloe more’n got on his hands an’ knees outside!  An’ then somehow Buck has a gun in each hand, and has stepped outside, too.  And I reckon the Bedloe boys saw the same thing in his eyes me an’ John saw there when he come back in.  Anyway, they got on their horses an’ we ain’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since.”

Miss Waverly sat very still, leaning forward a little, her eyes big and bright upon the eyes of this other woman.  The man, despite her calmer judgment, appealed to her imagination....

“You’d think,” Mrs. Smith went on, “that that man would be tired enough for one day, wouldn’t you?  Ridin’ all day, walking seven mile toting that big saddle on his back; an’ now he goes an’ starts out to ride the Lord knows how far.  What do you suppose a man like him is made out’n?”

Smith answered her out of the corner of his mouth from which a slow curl of smoke was mounting: 

“Sand, mostly.”

* * * * *

No, the girl could not say to these people that which she had to say of Buck Thornton.  She switched the conversation abruptly, asking them to tell her of Hill’s Corners.

She knew something of the place already.  Mr. Templeton had told her a great deal when insistently urging her not to do the thing she had determined to do and she had thought that he exaggerated merely in order to turn her aside from her purpose.  She had even heard far-reaching rumours of the border town in Crystal City, where her own home had been for the five years since the deaths of her parents.  These rumours, too, she had supposed inflated as rumours will be when they are bad and have travelled far.  Now it was a little anxiously that she asked for further information, and not altogether because she sought some new topic.