udgment he could depend. So, with
his shrewd eyes ever on the watch for strangers amongst his customers,
he longed for the hours to pass until he could close his store and
seek the gambler in his hut.

In the meantime Wild Bill had cut himself off from his fellows,
spending the long evening hours in the solitude of his humble
dwelling. The man was strangely calm, but his fierce eyes and pale
face told of an enormous strain of thought driving him. His mind was
sweeping along over a series of vivid pictures of past events, mixed
up with equally vivid and strongly marked scenes of possible events to
come. He was reviewing silently, sternly, a situation which, by some
extraordinary kink in his vanity, he felt it was for him to assume the
responsibility of. He felt, although with no feeling of pride, that
he, and he alone, could see it through.

The fact of the matter was that, by some strange mental process,
James' doings--his approach to the camp, in fact his very existence--had
somehow become a direct individual challenge to him. Without
acknowledging it to himself, he in some subtle way understood that
everything this desperado did was a challenge to him--a sneering,
contemptuous challenge to him. James was metaphorically snapping his
fingers under his very nose.

That these were his feelings was undeniable. That the thoughts of the
possibilities of an attack on the camp were the mainspring of his
antagonism to the man, that this voluntary guardianship of Scipio and
his twins was the source of his rage against him, it was impossible to
believe. They may have influenced him in a small degree, but only in a
small degree. The man was cast in a very different mold from that of a
simple philanthropist. It was the man's vanity, the headstrong vanity
of a strong and selfish man, that drove him. And as he sat silently
raging under his thoughts of the happenings of that day, had he put
his paramount feelings into words he would have demanded how James
dared to exist in a district which he, Wild Bill of Abilene, had made
his own.

He spent the evening sitting on his bed or pacing his little hut, his
thoughts tumbling headlong through his brain. He found himself almost
absently inspecting his armory, and loading and unloading his favorite
weapons. There was no definite direction in anything he thought or
did, unless it were in the overwhelming hatred against James which
colored his every feeling. Without realizing it, every fo