with a crowd of other
"Kiyi's" around a house of women and children. Heaping insult upon
insult, inveighing against his low blood, his ancestors, his dubious
origin, she at last flung out a wild taunt of his invalid wife, the
insult of a woman to a woman, until his white face grew rigid, and only
that Western-American fetich of the sanctity of sex kept his twitching
fingers from the lock of his rifle. Even her husband noticed it, and
with a half-authoritative "Let up on that, old gal," and a pat of his
freed left hand on her back, took his last parting. The ringleader,
still white under the lash of the woman's tongue, turned abruptly to the
second captive. "And if YOU'VE got anybody to say 'good-by' to, now's
your chance."

The man looked up. Nobody stirred or spoke. He was a stranger there,
being a chance confederate picked up by Red Pete, and known to no one.
Still young, but an outlaw from his abandoned boyhood, of which father
and mother were only a forgotten dream, he loved horses and stole them,
fully accepting the frontier penalty of life for the interference with
that animal on which a man's life so often depended. But he understood
the good points of a horse, as was shown by the ones he bestrode--until
a few days before the property of Judge Boompointer. This was his sole
distinction.

The unexpected question stirred him for a moment out of the attitude
of reckless indifference, for attitude it was, and a part of his
profession. But it may have touched him that at that moment he was less
than his companion and his virago wife. However, he only shook his head.
As he did so his eye casually fell on the handsome girl by the doorpost,
who was looking at him. The ringleader, too, may have been touched by
his complete loneliness, for HE hesitated. At the same moment he saw
that the girl was looking at his friendless captive.

A grotesque idea struck him.

"Salomy Jane, ye might do worse than come yere and say 'good-by' to a
dying man, and him a stranger," he said.

There seemed to be a subtle stroke of poetry and irony in this that
equally struck the apathetic crowd. It was well known that Salomy Jane
Clay thought no small potatoes of herself, and always held off the local
swain with a lazy nymph-like scorn. Nevertheless, she slowly disengaged
herself from the doorpost, and, to everybody's astonishment, lounged
with languid grace and outstretched hand towards the prisoner. The color
came into the gray reckless