Just as he did so, Clancy’s red shirt loomed up out of the mêlée, his arm lifted, and over the clack of the car trucks pounding the steel came the tinkle of breaking glass from the shattered pane in the door--the bullet had passed between the heads of the two men on the platform, missing them by a hair’s breadth. Another shot followed the first, another and another, dangerously close; splintering the woodwork around them; and then Perley fired. The half-breed spun round like a top, clapped his hand to his face and pitched over. Then the curve of the track shut out the scene, but for five minutes after they were out of sight they still got the whoops of the redskins, the shouts and curses of the miners, and the crackle of guns like the quick fire of a Gatling. You see it came to that before it was through, and there was some blood spilled--a lot of it--and, not counting Clancy’s, it wasn’t all “blanket” blood, either. Clancy? I’m coming to him. No, he wasn’t killed--if he had been I’d never be telling you this story. It was two or three days before Lee and Perley got the details of what happened. The redskins fought like fiends after the miners began to fire on them and had killed one or two, and, though they were finally subdued, the casualties, as I’ve said, weren’t all on their side by a hanged sight. But I was talking about Clancy. Well, that bullet of Perley’s caught him on the cheek bone, glanced in, plowed through his left eye, and landed up somewhere against the cartilage of his nose--a bullet will make queer tracks sometimes, worse than surveyors by a heap. They got him down to Big Cloud to a doctor’s, and before he was half cured he disappeared. They had a sort of makeshift hospital here in those days, and when I say “disappeared” I mean they found his bed empty one morning, that was all. I told you I didn’t know whether Perley had any hand in putting that Indian in the car, or the other redskins at the Bend. I don’t. I told you I didn’t know what was between him and the half-breed before all this happened. I don’t. Perley never said. But day after day as he and Lee pounded up and down on the local through the mountains, he began to grow silent and moody. Lee, young Lee then, was the only one that could get anywhere near the inside of his vest. He took to Lee, and Lee liked him; but even Lee had his limits when it came to confidences. There was lots Perley never opened his lips about. No, I don’t know as it makes much difference now. Lee was the first of the two to hear that Faro Clancy was “loose.” “It looks to me like a bad business,” he said, after telling Perley the news. Perley’s eyes just narrowed a little. “It looks more like a bad shot, a rotten bad shot,” he answered evenly. “That, if you like,” returned Lee; “but there’ll be more to follow.” “One would think you _knew_ Clancy,” said Perley, cool as ever.