is
revolvers busy throwing lead. One bullet was all it needed to do the
work and he was trying hard to put one into the proper place, using
all the skill he had attained in long practice under fire, when a shot
from John Slaughter's rifle broke his arm. The Texan was firing
slowly, lining his sights carefully every time before he pressed the
trigger. The Man from Bitter Creek was darting to and fro; his
revolver bullets were raising little clouds of dust about the
cattleman. He was nearing the area wherein the forty-five revolver was
more deadly than the clumsier rifle, when John Slaughter shot him
through the body.

But he was made of tough fiber and the extreme shock that would leave
some men stunned and prostrate only made him stagger a little. His
revolver was spitting an intermittent stream of fire and it continued
this after a second slug through his lungs had forced him to his
knees. He sank down fighting and got his third fatal wound before the
cow-boys carried him up to the ranch-house to die. There, after the
manner of many another wicked son of the border, he talked the matter
over dispassionately with his slayer and in the final moment when
death was creeping over him he alluded lightly to his own misdeeds.

"Anyhow I needed killing twenty years ago," he said.

No one mourned the passing of the Man from Bitter Creek; the members
of the pack who hunt the closest to the big he wolf are always the
gladdest to see him fall. Nor was there any sorrowing when John
Slaughter departed for the north. On the contrary both outlaws and
cow-men watched the dust of his herds melting into the sky with a
feeling of relief.

The outlaws continued as the weeks went by to speak his name with the
hard-eyed respect due one whose death would bring great glory on his
slayer; the cow-men cherished his memory more gratefully because
hundreds of cattle bearing his road-brand were grazing on their
ranges. All hands were more than willing to regard the incident as
closed--all save John Slaughter.

That was not his way. And in the season of the autumn round-up when
the ranchmen of Lincoln County were driving their cattle down out of
the breaks into the valley, when their herds were making great
crawling patches of brown against the gray of the surrounding
landscape, the black-bearded Texan came riding back out of the north.
He visited every outfit and greeted the owner or the foreman with the
same words in every case.

"I've com