stilled the din.

That silence suddenly broke to the scrape and crash of Oldring's chair
as he rose; and then, while he passed, a great gloomy figure, again the
thronged room stilled in silence yet deeper.

"Oldring, a word with you!" continued Venters.

"Ho! What's this?" boomed Oldring, in frowning scrutiny.

"Come outside, alone. A word for you--from your Masked Rider!"

Oldring kicked a chair out of his way and lunged forward with a stamp
of heavy boot that jarred the floor. He waved down his muttering, rising
men.

Venters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound had ever
before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of the rustler.

Oldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great breadth and
bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his high-top boots
with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a strange, unintelligible
curiosity to see Oldring alive. The rustler's broad brow, his large
black eyes, his sweeping beard, as dark as the wing of a raven, his
enormous width of shoulder and depth of chest, his whole splendid
presence so wonderfully charged with vitality and force and strength,
seemed to afford Venters an unutterable fiendish joy because for that
magnificent manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.

"Oldring, Bess is alive! But she's dead to you--dead to the life you
made her lead--dead as you will be in one second!"

Swift as lightning Venters's glance dropped from Oldring's rolling
eyes to his hands. One of them, the right, swept out, then toward his
gun--and Venters shot him through the heart.

Slowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the gun,
fell away. Venters's strangely acute faculties grasped the meaning
of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and heave, of the
quivering beard. But was that awful spirit in the black eyes only one of
vitality?

"Man--why--didn't--you--wait? Bess--was--" Oldring's whisper died under
his beard, and with a heavy lurch he fell forward.

Bounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the
street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and garden
to the sage. Here, under cover of the tall brush, he turned west and ran
on to the place where he had hidden his rifle. Securing that, he again
set out into a run, and, circling through the sage, came up behind Jane
Withersteen's stable and corrals. With laboring, dripping chest, and
pain as of a knife thrust in hi