Then it seemed to her that she heard some giant body threshing around near her; she heard a stifled scream and incoherent mutterings.  The thing was so close, the thumping and threshing so real, that she started and sat up in bed, staring wildly around.

She saw on the floor near her two men.  One had his hands buried in the other’s throat, and the face of the latter was black and horribly bloated.

This scene, Peggy felt, was real, and again she tried to scream.

The effort was successful, though the sound was not loud.  One of the men turned, and she knew him.

“Ben,” she said in an awed, scared voice, “what in God’s name are you doing?”

“Killin’ a snake!” he returned sullenly.

“Dale?” she inquired wildly.  Her hands were clasped, the fingers working, twisting and untwisting.

“Maison,” he told her, his face dark with passion.

“Because of me!  O, Ben!  Maison has done nothing to me.  It was Dale, Ben—­Dale came to our place and attacked me.  I felt him carrying me—­taking me somewhere.  This—­this place——­”

“Is Maison’s rooms,” Ben told her.  In his eyes was a new passion; he knelt beside the bed and stroked the girl’s hair.

“Dale, you said—­Dale.  Dale hurt you?  How?”

She told him, and he got up, a cold smile on his face.

“You feel better now, eh?  You can be alone for a few minutes?  I’ll send someone to you.”

He paid no attention to her objections, to her plea that she was afraid to be alone.  He grinned at her, the grin that had been on his face when he had shot Dal Colton, and backed away from her until he reached the stairs.

Outside he mounted his horse and visited several saloons.  There was no sign of Dale.  In the City Hotel he came upon a man who told him that earlier in the day Dale had organized a posse and had gone to the Double A to arrest Sanderson.  This man was not a friend of Dale’s, and one of the posse had told him of Dale’s plan.

Nyland mounted his horse again and headed it for the neck of the basin.  In his heart was the same lust that had been there while he had been riding toward Okar.

And in his soul was a rage that had not been sated by the death of the banker who, a few minutes before Nyland’s arrival, had been so smugly reviewing the pleasurable incidents of his life.

CHAPTER XXX

THE LAW TAKES A HAND

Barney Owen was tying the knot of the rope more securely when he heard the bolt on the pantry door shoot back.  He wheeled swiftly, to see Mary Bransford emerging from the pantry, her hands covering her face in a vain endeavor to shut from sight the grisly horror she had confronted when she had reached her feet after recovering consciousness.

Evidently she had no knowledge of what had occurred, for when at a sound Owen made and she uncovered her eyes, she saw Owen and instantly fainted.