ourage to open that door, but Billy Louise had courage enough
to open it, and to step inside and close the door after her. She did
not look at anything in the cabin while she did it, though. She kept
her eyelids down so that she only saw the floor directly in front of
the door. She had a sense of relief that it looked perfectly natural,
though dusty.

"Throw up your hands!" came hoarsely from the bunk. Billy Louise
gasped and pulled her gun, and dropped crouching to the floor. Also
she looked up. She had not recognized that voice, and while she had
never except in imagination faced an emergency like this, she had
played robbers and rescues too often not to have formed a mental habit
to fit the situation. What she did she had done many, many times in
her "pretend" world, sitting somewhere dreaming.

From her crouching position she looked into Ward's fever-wild eyes. He
was sitting up in the bunk, and he was pointing his big forty-five at
her relentlessly. "Get up from there!" he ordered sternly. "Don't try
any game like that on me, Buck Olney! Get up and go over and sit in
that chair. I've got a few things to say to you."

Billy Louise somehow grasped the truth, up to a certain point. Ward
was sick; so sick he didn't know her. She thought she would better
humor him. She got up and went and sat in the chair as he directed.

Ward, keeping the gun pointing her way, sneered at her in a way that
made the soul of Billy Louise crimple. She faced him big-eyed, too
amazed at the change in him to feel any fear that he would harm her.
He had whiskers two inches long. She wouldn't have known him except
for his hair--and that was terribly tousled; and his eyes, though they
were wild and angry. His voice was hoarse, and while he glared at her,
he coughed with a hard, croupy resonance.

"So you came back, did yuh?" he asked grimly at last. "Well, you
didn't get a chance to plug me in the back. How long did you lay up
there on the bluff this time, waiting to catch me when I wasn't
looking? I've been wishing I'd loft that rope so it would have hung
you, you damned ------!" (Billy Louise listened round-eyed to certain
man-sized epithets strange to her ears.)

"I suppose you and Foxy and that halfbreed have been fixing up some
more evidence, huh? You figure that I can't catch 'em this time and
work the brands over, so they'll stand Y6es, and I'll get railroaded to
the pen. Well, you've overplayed your hand, ol