window shutters. Then Blaisdell
called the Isbel faction to have food and drink. Jean felt no hunger.
And Blue, who had kept apart from the others, showed no desire to eat.
Neither did he smoke, though early in the day he had never been without
a cigarette between his lips.

Twilight fell and darkness came. Not a light showed anywhere in the
blackness.

"Wal, I reckon it's aboot time," said Blue, and he led the way out of
the cabin to the back of the lot. Jean strode behind him, carrying his
rifle and an ax. Silently the other men followed. Blue turned to the
left and led through the field until he came within sight of a dark
line of trees.

"Thet's where the road turns off," he said to Jean. "An' heah's the
back of Coleman's place.... Wal, Jean, good luck!"

Jean felt the grip of a steel-like hand, and in the darkness he caught
the gleam of Blue's eyes. Jean had no response in words for the
laconic Blue, but he wrung the hard, thin hand and hurried away in the
darkness.

Once alone, his part of the business at hand rushed him into eager
thrilling action. This was the sort of work he was fitted to do. In
this instance it was important, but it seemed to him that Blue had
coolly taken the perilous part. And this cowboy with gray in his thin
hair was in reality the great King Fisher! Jean marveled at the fact.
And he shivered all over for Jorth. In ten minutes--fifteen, more or
less, Jorth would lie gasping bloody froth and sinking down. Something
in the dark, lonely, silent, oppressive summer night told Jean this.
He strode on swiftly. Crossing the road at a run, he kept on over the
ground he had traversed during the afternoon, and in a few moments he
stood breathing hard at the edge of the common behind Greaves's store.

A pin point of light penetrated the blackness. It made Jean's heart
leap. The Jorth contingent were burning the big lamp that hung in the
center of Greaves's store. Jean listened. Loud voices and coarse
laughter sounded discord on the melancholy silence of the night. What
Blue had called his instinct had surely guided him aright. Death of
Gaston Isbel was being celebrated by revel.

In a few moments Jean had regained his breath. Then all his faculties
set intensely to the action at hand. He seemed to magnify his hearing
and his sight. His movements made no sound. He gained the wagon,
where he crouched a moment.

The ground seemed a pale, obscure medium, hardly more real