ought, or strove to protect
themselves from the maddened ones nearest, the sound of the shot
brought them to their senses. A fight was one thing, a shooting
another. Gunmen as many of them were, they dreaded the results if
firearms were resorted to in that dense mass of excited men, and each
one stood still, panting, listening, calmed.

"I think Bells Park has played even," came a calm, steady voice at the
door.

They turned in surprise. Standing in the doorway, motionless,
scornful, and immaculate, with her white hat still on her head, as if
she had just entered from the street, stood The Lily.

"Poor old Bells! Poor old man!" she said, in that panting silence, and
then for what seemed a long time looked at the floor. "Bells Park,"
she said at last, lifting her eyes, "is dead!"

Suddenly, and before any one could speak, she clenched her hands at
her sides, her eyes blazed, her face twisted, and went white.

"Oh," she said bitterly, in a voice low-pitched and tortured with
passion, "I hate you! I hate you! You brutes of Goldpan. You gambling
dogs! You purchasers of women. From this time, forever, I am done with
you!"

She lifted her arms, opened her hands, and made one wide, sweeping,
inclusive gesture, and turned and walked out into the night.

"Dead! Dead! Bells is dead!"

Dick heard an unutterably sorrowful voice exclaim; and Bill,
half-denuded, his blue shirt in shreds, his face puffed from blows,
and his cut knuckles dripping a slow, trickling red, plunged toward
him, followed by the smith. No one blocked their way as they went,
the three together, as they had come. Behind them, the room broke into
hushed, awed exclamations, and began to writhe and twist, as men
lifted and revived the fallen, and took stock of their injuries.

Two men came running down the street with weapons in hand; and the
moonlight, which had lifted until it shone white and clear into the
squalors of the camp, picked out dim blazes from the stars on their
breasts. They were the town marshal and a deputy sheriff, summoned
from some distant saloon by the turmoil, and hastening forward to
arrest the rioters, not suspecting that men were wanted for a graver
offense. Standing alone in the moonlight, in the middle of the road,
with her hands clenched before her, the three men discerned another
figure, and, when they gained it, saw that in the eyes of The Lily
swam unshed tears.

Dick and the smith hastened onward toward her rooms; but Bi