However others may have felt that night about Laramie's affairs, one man, McAlpin, was proud of his ride, desperately wounded, all the way to town. Laramie had made a confidant of no one but Kate. His experience in being trapped was not so pleasant that he liked to talk about it and neither McAlpin's shrewd questioning nor Carpy's restrained curiosity was gratified that night. In the circumstances, McAlpin's fancy had full play; and distrustful of his imagination unaided, he repaired early to the Mountain House bar to stimulate it. Thus it gradually transpired along the bar, either from the stimulant or its reaction or from McAlpin's excitement, that a big fight had taken place that morning in the Falling Wall from which only Laramie had returned alive. It was known that he had come back and inference as to who the dead men might be could center only on his two active enemies, Tom Stone and Harry Van Horn. The pawky barn boss, who possessed perfectly the art of tantalizing innuendo, thus stirred the bar-room pool to the depths. McAlpin chose the rustler's end of the bar--as Abe Hawk's old stand was called--and held the interest of the room against all comers. As the place filled for the evening, his cap, its vizor more than ordinarily awry, was a conspicuous object and it became a favor on his part to accept the courtesies of the bar at any man's hands. "I knowed how it had to end," he would repeat when he had rambled again around all aspects of the mysterious encounter. "I knowed if they kept after Jim how it _had_ to end. Why, hell, gentlemen," he would aver, planting a hob-nailed barn boot on the foot-rail, while swinging on one elbow from the polished face of the mahogany, "I've _seen_ the boy stop a coyote on the go, at 900 yards--what could you expect? No, no, not again. What? Well, go ahead; just a dash o' bitters in mine, Luke. Thank you. "Well, boys, accordin' to my notion, there's two men never would be missed in this country, anyway, if nobody ever seen 'em again. 'N' if my count is anywhere near right, nobody ever will see 'em again. They chased Laramie one foot too far--just one foot--'n' it looks as if they got what was comin' to 'em. I won't name 'em--they won't bother no more in this country." He had become so absorbed in his recital that the entrance into the bar-room from the barber shop of a booted and spurred man escaped him. The man, advancing deliberately, heard the last of McAlpin's words. He got fairly close to the unsuspecting barn boss unobserved. A few in the listening circle, noting the approach of the new arrival, stepped back a little--for, of all men that might be expected, after McAlpin's dark intimations, to appear, then and there, alive and aggressive, was Tom Stone.