s that the fast shootin' is fine,
but sure shootin' is a lot better. D'you get me?"

"That's a fine sermon," smiled Bard, "but you're too young to make a
convincing preacher, Miss Fortune."

"Misfortune," said the girl quickly, "don't have to be old to do a lot
of teachin'."

She sat back and regarded him with something of a frown and with folded
arms.

He said with a sudden earnestness: "You seem to take it for granted that
I'm due for a lot of trouble."

But she shook her head gloomily.

"I know what you're due for; I can see it in your eyes; I can hear it in
your way of talkin'. If you was to ride the range with a sheriff on one
side of you and a marshal on the other you couldn't help fallin' into
trouble."

"As a fortune-teller," remarked Nash, "you'd make a good undertaker,
Sally."

"Shut up, Steve. I've seen this bird in action and I know what I'm
talking about. When you coming back this way, Bard?"

He said thoughtfully: "Perhaps to-morrow night--perhaps--"

"It ought to be to-morrow night," she said pointedly, her eyes on Nash.

The latter had pushed his chair back a trifle and sat now with downward
head and his right hand resting lightly on his thigh. Only the place in
which they sat was illumined by the two lamps, and the forward part of
the room, nearer the street, was a seat of shadows, wavering when the
wind stirred the flame in one of the lamps or sent it smoking up the
chimney. Sally and Bard sat with their backs to the door, and Nash half
facing it.

"Steve," she said, with a sudden low tenseness of voice that sent a
chill up Bard's spinal cord, "Steve, what's wrong?"

"This," answered the cowboy calmly, and whirling in his chair, his gun
flashed and exploded.

They sprang up in time to see the bulky form of Butch Conklin rise out
of the shadows in the front part of the room with outstretched arms,
from one of which a revolver dropped clattering to the floor. Backward
he reeled as though a hand were pulling him from behind, and then
measured his length with a crash on the floor.

Bard, standing erect, quite forgot to touch his weapon, but Sally had
produced a ponderous forty-five with mysterious speed and now crouched
behind a table with the gun poised. Nash, bending low, ran forward to
the fallen man.

"Nicked, but not done for," he called.

"Thank God!" cried Sally, and the two joined Nash about the prostrate
body.

That bullet had had very certain intentions, but by a freak of