h them. Their lusty,
wandering shouts broke out in gusts of hilarity. Their pistols, aimed
at cans or prairie dogs or anything, cracked as they galloped at large.
Their speeding, clear-cut forms would shine upon the bluffs, and,
descending, merge in the dust their horses had raised. Yet all this was
nothing in the vastness of the growing day.

Beyond their voices the rim of the sun moved above the violet hills, and
Drybone, amid the quiet, long, new fields of radiance, stood august and
strange.

Down along the tall, bare slant from the graveyard the two horsemen were
riding back. They could be seen across the river, and the horse-racers
grew curious. As more and more watched, the crowd began to speak. It was
a calf the two were bringing. It was too small for a calf. It was dead.
It was a coyote they had roped. See it swing! See it fall on the road!

"It's a coffin, boys!" said one, shrewd at guessing.

At that the event of last night drifted across their memories, and they
wheeled and spurred their ponies. Their crowding hoofs on the bridge
brought the swimmers from the waters below and, dressing, they climbed
quickly to the plain and followed the gathering. By the door already
were Jerky Bill and Limber Jim and the Doughie and always more, dashing
up with their ponies; halting with a sharp scatter of gravel to hear and
comment. Barker was gone, but the important coroner told his news. And
it amazed each comer, and set him speaking and remembering past things
with the others. "Dead!" each one began. "Her, does he say?"

"Why, pshaw!"

"Why, Frenchy said Doc had her cured!"

Jack Saunders claimed she had rode to Box Elder with Lin McLean. "Dead?
Why, pshaw!"

"Seems Doc couldn't swim her out."

"Couldn't swim her out?"

"That's it. Doc couldn't swim her out."

"Well--there's one less of us."

"Sure! She was one of the boys."

"She grub-staked me when I went broke in '84."

"She gave me fifty dollars onced at Lander, to buy a saddle."

"I run agin her when she was a biscuit-shooter."

"Sidney, Nebraska. I run again her there, too."

"I knowed her at Laramie."

"Where's Lin? He knowed her all the way from Bear Creek to Cheyenne."

They laughed loudly at this.

"That's a lonesome coffin," said the Doughie. "That the best you could
do?"

"You'd say so!" said Toothpick Kid.

"Choices are getting scarce up there," said Chalkeye. "We looked the lot
over."

They were arriving from their search amon