There was no smoke hanging to mark the spot.

Morgan slipped softly from his concealment, coming out at Peden's back
door. Bending low, he hurried back over the track he had come, keeping
the heaps of kegs, barrels, and boxes between him and the road. And
there, twenty yards or so distant, in a space between two wagons, he saw
a man standing, pistol in hand, all set and primed for another shot, but
looking rather puzzled and uncertain over the sudden disappearance of
his mark.

Morgan was upon him in a few silent strides, unseen and unheard, his gun
raised to throw a quick shot if the situation called for it. The man was
Dell Hutton, the county treasurer. His face was white. There was the
look in his eyes of a man condemned when he turned and confronted
Morgan.

"Who was it that shot at you, Morgan?" he inquired, his voice husky in
the fog of his fright. He was laboring hard to put a face on it that
would make him the champion of peace; he peered around with simulated
caution, as if he had rushed to the spot ready to uphold the law.

Morgan let the pitiful effort pass for what it was worth, and that was
very little.

"I don't know who it was, Hutton," he replied, with a careless laugh,
putting his pistol away. "If you see him, tell him I let a little thing
like that pass--once."

Morgan did not linger for any further words. Several shock-haired
children had come bursting from the tent, their contention silenced.
They stood looking at Morgan as he came back into the road, wonder in
their muggy faces. Heads appeared at windows, back doors opened
cautiously, showing eyes at cracks.

"Some fool shootin' off his gun," Morgan heard a man growl as he passed
under a window of a thin-sided house, from which the excited voices of
women came like the squeaks of unnested mice.

"What was goin' on back there?" Conboy inquired as Morgan approached the
hotel. The proprietor was a little way out from his door, anxiety,
rather than interest, in his face.

"Some fool shootin' off his gun, I guess," Morgan replied, feeling that
the answer fitted the case very well.

He gave Dora the same explanation when she met him at the blue door of
the dining-room, trouble in her fair blue eyes. She looked at him with
keen questioning, not satisfied that she had heard it all.

"I hope he burnt his fingers," she said.

CHAPTER XV

WILL HIS LUCK HOLD?

Dora escorted Morgan to a table apart from the few heavy feeders who
were a