le countenance now lay a spirit both
desperate and wicked.

Dog appreciated that what he did must be speedily done, and before the
pause broke; before the startled accusers had realised the mission that
had brought him his pistol had leaped from its holster; had, several
times, risen and fallen in the grasp of a hand hinged on a steady wrist,
and had barked each time its muzzle fell level.

Wreaths of smoke and the acrid smell of burnt powder drifted through the
barber shop, and four bodies lay on the puncheon floor--of whom two were
already dead.

Swiftly the night took Dog Burtree to itself, and almost as swiftly a
posse was on the trail, with Joe Gregory, now high sheriff of Marlin
County, riding a blood-sweat out of his black colt to assume command of
the man-hunt.

The quarry circled over a wide arc of broken fastnesses and went to
earth in an abandoned cabin thickly timbered about, and shielded back of
huge boulders. There he barred the door and barked out his defiant
challenge, "Come in an' git me!"

The cordon closed about the house and awaited the light of day. Until
hunger and thirst conquered him, the few casualties were all of the
refugee's making, but after two nights and a day of siege, a white rag
appeared through a chink on the end of a ramrod.

"Tell Joe Gregory he kin come in," shouted the voice of the besieged
man. "I'm ready ter surrender ter _him_--but not ter nobody else!"

"No," shouted back Gregory, who already wore a bandage about a grazed
arm; "you come out, and come with your hands high."

So it was that Saul's single convert came, and it was three weeks
afterwards that, the jury having spoken and the higher court having
denied an appeal, Joe sat in a day-coach leaving Marlin Town, while in
the seat facing him sat Dog Burtree, with irons on his wrists, and a
journey before him which should have no return. He was going to the
electric chair at Eddyville.

Word ran mysteriously through the length of the train that the slight,
youthful prisoner in charge of the tall, grave-faced sheriff was the
Holly Hill murderer, and passengers sauntered, with specious
carelessness and inquisitive side glances, past the section where he
sat.

The condemned man gave them back stare for stare, seeking the sorry
refuge of a bravado which, when he forgot his pose and gazed out of the
window, sagged into a spiritless and haunted misery. The face of his
captor was harder to read, yet the young woman who