She was young to have a kid like that, Rock thought. And it was tough losing a man by the gun route. Was it going to be his lot to step into the breach? If--if---- Well, he had to get to the bottom of this, somehow. Here was a fellow who looked exactly like him, same build, same age, same features, shot down in a river bottom. It smelled of ambush. The Seventy Seven was less than an hour’s ride to the west. And Elmer Duffy was running the Seventy Seven. For the moment the Maltese Cross and Buck Walters and the mission he had undertaken for Uncle Bill Sayre had no place in Rock’s mind. The girl took the baby out of his arms and carried her off into a bedroom. Rock put away these reflections and gathered the dishes off the table and began to wash them. “I might as well earn my night’s lodging,” he murmured whimsically, probably to hide the fact that he was moved by a desire to make his sympathy take some practical form. The girl reappeared, put the food away in a pantry, took a cloth, and wiped the dishes as Rock washed. She made no comment. She moved quickly, and efficiently. Her hands were deft. But her mind was elsewhere. She was scarcely conscious of him, Rock perceived. And when the supper things were finished, he went outside and sat down on a chopping block to smoke a cigarette in the twilight. Dusk gathered. The pearl-gray mist of the evening sky merged into the lucent shroud of a plains night. Crickets chirped in the grass. The Marias whispered its sibilant song in a stony bed. A lamp glowed through a window in the house. Rock saw the girl sitting by the table again, as when he first saw her, elbows on the wood, face buried in her palms. “She aches inside,” he thought. “Poor devil! She needs folks or friends or something, right now.” But he couldn’t be one or the other, he knew. He was too sensible to blunder with well-meant, useless words. She had forgotten he was there. So he walked softly down to the stable, drew his blankets in the canvas tarpaulin off to one side, under the stars, and turned in. So the Seventy Seven did locate on the Marias instead of the Judith? Uncle Bill was right. This might be no healthier a neighborhood for him than it had proved for his double. “Well, you got to be in this neighborhood for a spell, whether it’s dangerous or not, you darned fool,” Rock apostrophized himself. “This is the Maltese range, and you’ve promised to look over the Cross.” Thus Rock, with the blankets drawn up to his chin and his gaze meditatively on the three stars that make Orion’s belt.