eed for which the warrant
demanded his arrest. Willock wished many of his other deeds had been
prompted by impulses as generous as those which had led to Kansas
Kimball's death. Perhaps it was the irony of justice that he should be
threatened by the one act of bloodshed which had saved Lahoma's life.
If he must be hanged or imprisoned because he had not, like the rest of
the band, given himself up for official pardon, it was as well to
suffer from one deed as from another. But it would be better still, as
in the past, to escape all consequences. Without Gledware, they could
prove nothing.

Would Gledware testify, now that Red Kimball, who had bought his
testimony with the death of the Indian, no longer lived to exact
payment? Willock felt sure he would. In the first place, Gledware had
placed himself on record as a witness, hence could hardly retreat; in
the second place, he would doubtless be anxious to rid himself of the
danger of ever meeting Willock, whom his conscience must have caused
him to hate with the hatred of the man who wrongs his benefactor.

Willock transferred all his rage against the dead enemy to the living.
He reminded himself how Gledware had caused the death of Red Feather,
not in the heat of fury or in blind terror, but in coldblooded
bargaining. He meditated on Gledware's attitude toward Lahoma; he
thought nothing good of him, he magnified the evil. That scene at the
grave of his wife--and Red Feather's account of how he had dug up the
body for a mere pin of pearl and onyx.... Ought such a creature to
live to condemn him, to bring sorrow on the stepdaughter he had basely
refused to acknowledge?

To wait for the coming of the witness would be to lose an opportunity
that might never recur. Willock would go to him. In doing so, he
would not only take Gledware by surprise, but would leave the only
neighborhood in which search would be made for himself. Thus it came
about that while the environs of the cove were being minutely examined,
Brick, riding his fastest pony, was on the way to Kansas City.

He reached Kansas City without unusual incident, where he was accepted
naturally, as a product of the West. Had his appearance been twice as
uncouth, twice as wild, it would have accorded all the better with
western superstitions that prevailed in this city, fast forgetting that
it had been a western outpost. At the hotel, whose situation he knew
from Lahoma's letters, he learned that Gled