under his weight.
He went over to the bed, with short steps like a drunken man, and
lowered himself down on it.

Sinclair had gone into the hotel, and doubtless that meant that he had
grown impatient. The fever to kill was burning in the big man. Then
Lowrie heard a steady step come regularly up the stairs. They creaked
under a heavy weight.

Lowrie drew his gun. It caught twice; finally he jerked it out in a
frenzy. He would shoot when the door opened, without waiting, and then
trust to luck to fight his way through the men below.

In the meantime the muzzle of the revolver wabbled crazily from side to
side, up and down. He clutched the barrel with the other hand. And
still the weapon shook.

Curling up his knee before his breast he ground down with both hands.
That gave him more steadiness; but would not this contorted position
destroy all chance of shooting accurately? His own prophecy, made over
the dead body of Hal Sinclair, that all three of them would see that
face again, came back to him with a sense of fatality. Some
forward-looking instinct, he assured himself, had given him that
knowledge.

The step upon the stairs came up steadily. But the mind of Lowrie,
between the steps, leaped hither and yon, a thousand miles and back.
What if his nerve failed him at the last moment? What if he buckled and
showed yellow and the shame of it followed him? Better a hundred times
to die by his own hand.

Excitement, foreboding, the weariness of the long trail--all were
working upon Lowrie.

Nearer drew the step. It seemed an hour since he had first heard it
begin to climb the stairs. It sounded heavily on the floor outside his
door. There was a heavy tapping on the door itself. For an instant the
clutch of Lowrie froze around his gun; then he twitched the muzzle back
against his own breast and fired.

There was no pain--only a sense of numbness and a vague feeling of torn
muscles, as if they were extraneous matter. He dropped the revolver on
the bed and pressed both hands against his wound. Then the door opened,
and there appeared, not Riley Sinclair, but Pop Hansen.

"What in thunder--" he began.

"Get Riley Sinclair. There's been an accident," said Lowrie faintly and
huskily. "Get Riley Sinclair; quick. I got something to say to him."

3

Riley Sinclair rode over the mountain. An hour of stern climbing lay
behind him, but it was not sympathy for his tired horse that made him
draw rein. Sympathy was