here for a couple uh days, at the very least, or I never woulda drove a
nail, by hokey!"

"It is a darned shame, to have a nice, new jail and nobody to use it
on," sympathized Ford, his eyes half-closed and steely. "I'd like to
help you out, all right. Maybe I'd better kill you, Bill; they _might_
stretch a point and call it manslaughter--and I could use the bounty to
help pay a lawyer, if it ever come to a head as a trial."

Whereat Bill almost wept.

Ford pushed his hands deep into his pockets and walked away, sneering
openly at Bill, the marshal, the jail, and the town which owned it, and
at wives and matrimony and the world which held all these vexations.

He went straight to the shack, drank a cup of coffee, and packed
everything he could find that belonged to him and was not too large for
easy carrying on horseback; and when Sandy, hovering uneasily around
him, asked questions, he told him briefly to go off in a corner and lie
down; which advice Sandy understood as an invitation to mind his own
affairs.

Like Bill, Sandy could have wept at the ingratitude of this man. But he
asked no more questions and he made no more objections. He picked up the
story of the unpronounceable count who owned the castle in the Black
Forest and had much tribulation and no joy until the last chapter, and
when Ford went out, with his battered, sole-leather suitcase and his
rifle in its pigskin case, he kept his pale eyes upon his book and
refused even a grunt in response to Ford's grudging: "So long, Sandy."

CHAPTER IV

Reaction

Even when a man consistently takes Life in twenty-four-hour doses and
likes those doses full-flavored with the joys of this earth, there are
intervals when the soul of him is sick, and Life becomes a nauseous
progression of bleak futility. He may, in his revulsion against it,
attempt to end it all; he may, in sheer disgust of it, take his doses
stronger than ever before, as if he would once for all choke to death
that part of him which is fine enough to rebel against it; he may even
forswear, in melancholy penitence, that which has served to give it
flavor, and vow him vows of abstemiousness at which the grosser part of
him chuckles ironically; or, he may blindly follow the first errant
impulse for change of environment, in the half-formed hope that new
scenes may, without further effort on his part, serve to make of him a
new man--a man for whom he can feel some respect.

Ford did none o