er."
The boy stared at him with horror-stricken eyes. "Doble? My God, did I
kill him?" He clutched at a porch post to steady himself. The hills were
sliding queerly up into the sky.
CHAPTER XIV
TEN YEARS
All the way back to Denver, while the train ran down through the narrow,
crooked canon, Dave's mind dwelt in a penumbra of horror. It was
impossible he could have killed Doble, he kept telling himself. He had
fired back into the night without aim. He had not even tried to hit the
men who were shooting at him. It must be some ghastly joke.
None the less he knew by the dull ache in his heart that this awful thing
had fastened on him and that he would have to pay the penalty. He had
killed a man, snuffed out his life wantonly as a result of taking the
law into his own hands. The knowledge of what he had done shook him to
the soul.
It remained with him, in the background of his mind, up to and through
his trial. What shook his nerve was the fact that he had taken a life,
not the certainty of the punishment that must follow.
West called to see him at the jail, and to the cattleman Dave told the
story exactly as it had happened. The owner of the Fifty-Four Quarter
Circle walked up and down the cell rumpling his hair.
"Boy, why didn't you let on to me what you was figurin' on pullin' off?
I knew you was some bull-haided, but I thought you had a lick o' sense
left."
"Wisht I had," said Dave miserably.
"Well, what's done's done. No use cryin' over the bust-up. We'd better
fix up whatever's left from the smash. First off, we'll get a lawyer, I
reckon."
"I gotta li'l' money left--twenty-six dollars," spoke up Dave timidly.
"Maybe that's all he'll want."
West smiled at this babe in the woods. "It'll last as long as a snowball
in you-know-where if he's like some lawyers I've met up with."
It did not take the lawyer whom West engaged long to decide on the line
the defense must take. "We'll show that Miller and Doble were crooks and
that they had wronged Sanders. That will count a lot with a jury," he
told West. "We'll admit the killing and claim self-defense."
The day before the trial Dave was sitting in his cell cheerlessly reading
a newspaper when visitors were announced. At sight of Emerson Crawford
and Bob Hart he choked in his throat. Tears brimmed in his eyes. Nobody
could have been kinder to him than West had been, but these were home
folks. He had known them many years. Their kindness i
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