n, muttering to himself, he mounted Bells, and
stared again at Venters, and then, leading the other horses, he rode
into the grove and disappeared.

Once, long before, on the night Venters had carried Bess through the
canyon and up into Surprise Valley, he had experienced the strangeness
of faculties singularly, tinglingly acute. And now the same sensation
recurred. But it was different in that he felt cold, frozen, mechanical
incapable of free thought, and all about him seemed unreal, aloof,
remote. He hid his rifle in the sage, marking its exact location with
extreme care. Then he faced down the lane and strode toward the center
of the village. Perceptions flashed upon him, the faint, cold touch of
the breeze, a cold, silvery tinkle of flowing water, a cold sun shining
out of a cold sky, song of birds and laugh of children, coldly distant.
Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and
tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew the
polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his hands as he
wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low to his gun-sheaths.
Men meeting him in the walk gave him wide berth. In front of Bevin's
store a crowd melted apart for his passage, and their faces and whispers
were faces and whispers of a dream. He turned a corner to meet Tull
face to face, eye to eye. As once before he had seen this man pale to
a ghastly, livid white so again he saw the change. Tull stopped in his
tracks, with right hand raised and shaking. Suddenly it dropped, and he
seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters's sight. Next he saw
many horses with bridles down--all clean-limbed, dark bays or
blacks--rustlers' horses! Loud voices and boisterous laughter, rattle of
dice and scrape of chair and clink of gold, burst in mingled din from an
open doorway. He stepped inside.

With the sight of smoke-hazed room and drinking, cursing, gambling,
dark-visaged men, reality once more dawned upon Venters.

His entrance had been unnoticed, and he bent his gaze upon the drinkers
at the bar. Dark-clothed, dark-faced men they all were, burned by the
sun, bow-legged as were most riders of the sage, but neither lean nor
gaunt. Then Venters's gaze passed to the tables, and swiftly it swept
over the hard-featured gamesters, to alight upon the huge, shaggy, black
head of the rustler chief.

"Oldring!" he cried, and to him his voice seemed to split a bell in his
ears.

It