me," she said, "only to bring a warning--while there
was time."

"Warning of what?" The question was ominously quiet.

"Against confusing black hallucinations with all the saner, bigger
things that you know. Warning against betraying a confidence you have
won by stampeding people who believe in you and follow you blindly."

The eyes of Boone Wellver narrowed and hardened defensively under this
arraignment from lips that had once shaped for him softer responses.
Then as they fell again upon the man who had died in his cause, a
baleful light reawoke in them. From that spokesman came a silent
argument which needed no voice: "Here I am, not a theory but a fact. I
died for you!"

He spoke to her as one who makes an explanation, not of obligation but
as a concession to the motives which had brought her.

"Before I usurped the functions of the law I appealed to the law.
Blackstone says that before a man takes human life--even in defence of
his own--he must 'retreat to the ditch or wall'! I obeyed that mandate,
and the law refused me. Saul Fulton came back ten thousand miles to have
me murdered, and by accident an innocent man died in my stead. Then, and
then only, I assumed a man's prerogative to do for himself and his
people what courts of injustice decline to do for him." He paused then,
and the ferocity of his thoughts brought an ironical smile to his tight
lips.

"You _have_ come a long way. One can only appreciate what rampant
difficulties stood in your path by considering how sacred and unbending
are the artificial little laws of your world. It was a bold thing and a
kindly thing for you to do, but the text that you preach is--you must
pardon the candour of saying it--a sermon of platitudes. They have lost
their virtue with me--because, tonight, I'm looking straight into facts
and thinking naked thoughts."

"Just what are you going to do?"

"Do?" He echoed the word tempestuously. "I'm going to call on Tom Carr
to deliver Saul Fulton over to me and my mob. I suppose you'd call them
that. Saul is going to die, and Tom is going into exile. I reckon first,
though, there'll be a sort of a battle. The Carrs are a headstrong
crew."

He turned on his heel with the air of a man who has surrendered to the
demands of politeness moments that can be ill spared from a more
pressing urgency, and walked around the cot to lift from the floor
behind it a heavy box of rifle cartridges. But when he had straightened
up and his ey