To marry Bunchy, the Inger thought as he lounged in the street outside the Inn on her wedding night, was the worst that could come to her. He drifted into a saloon across the way, one of the meaner places, and on this night of plenty almost unfrequented. He sat down at a table in range with the doors of the Inn, and drank reflectively. That day that he had had her, what if he had galloped away with her to the foothills, to the camp, to the other side of somewhere? He sat thinking of her, wondering why he had not dared it, playing at what might have been. On the table lay a San Francisco newspaper, three days old. As he drank he glanced at the headlines. “War May Last Another Year,” he read. “Reserves of Three Nations to be Called Out Within the Month.” The thought had come to him before, since the money came. To-night he turned to it in a kind of relief: Why not go there? There was fighting worth a man’s hand. Drunken Indians, an outlaw or two, a horse thief strung up in a wink and all over—these were all that he knew of warfare. Was he to die with no more understanding than this of how a man might live and die? The thing was happening now—the adventure of the great guns and the many deaths. Yet he, a man like other men, sat here idle. He closed his eyes and lay with those men in the trenches, or leapt up to kill again and again at fifty yards, saw the men roll in torture, saw them red and grovelling in red.... A lust of the thing came on him. He wanted it, as he wanted no other thing that his mind had ever played with. He forgot Jem Moor’s daughter in that imaginary desert. He swallowed and tasted and opened his eyes as on a forgotten world. He pounded the table for more liquor. “Why don’t you go to the war, you scared, snivelling Pale-liver?” he demanded of the shuffling bartender. The small man’s little red-rimmed and red-shot eyes lighted, and his lips drew back over black teeth. “If I was a young dog like you, I’d be there stickin’ in the lead, you bet,” he said. “What you ’fraid of?” “Nothin’,” said the Inger, suddenly; “I’m goin’!” “Plough some of ’em up prime for me,” begged the old man. “I croaked two men myself afore I was your age. It were in a sheriff’s raid, though,” he regretfully added. The Inger looked at him thoughtfully. It occurred to him that though he was credited with it, he himself had never killed a man in his life. Yet killing was a man’s job, and over there was the war, and he had the means to get to it. There was need of more to kill—and to be killed. And he had been hanging on a shelf of Whiteface for all these months!