Three days later Mort Cotton came into the cabin, his bushy eyebrows showing curiously white. ‘I hate to tell on the kid, Bob, but it’ll get to you anyway,’ he said. ‘He’s been riding that rat-tail on a hackamore--he’s ridin’ him now. And what I’m gettin’ at is, he ain’t havin’ trouble.’ Bob’s face turned to the wall. He had many days to think it out while his leg was in boards.... It was disobedience, but had he been right? Didn’t Bart have something on the gray others hadn’t--with other horses, too, perhaps? It wasn’t a matter of just sitting a horse. Bob knew without vanity he could do that as well as most men. It was something new; not to be expressed. He had seen the deformed look of the gray’s head straighten out as Bart drew near; the red flame of the eye die down. Bart had something on him--a new feel with a horse. ‘I belong to the old school,’ he muttered. ‘All we know is that a hoss has to be broke; that a hoss is ruined that once gets his own way. Bart ain’t a part of that. He makes a hoss forget his own way. He gives him his courage back. But it’s disobedience--I dasn’t let Bart get away with it. They’d think I was crazy--if I didn’t get rid of the rat-tail.’ Mort Cotton took the old outlaw back to the Cup Q as a led-horse. III FINALLY the morning, a year or two later, when old Batten, the storekeeper at Bismo, was found murdered by Bob Leadley’s serving woman who had gone over for a can of condensed milk. Her outcry roused the town. The old man had been hammered over the head and pulled out from his own back room, or else he had reached that far before they finished him. Things were spilled. There were sticky tracks on the floor and a winy smell in the gray of morning. A cask of apricot brandy in the place, no one knew how old, was still dripping when Bob Leadley got there. He recalled that Batten had never sold any of this brandy, holding it choice and sending a little flask to any one who was sick. What struck him queerly, too, was old Batten’s thin white hair, not combed back as usual. Letchie Welton came in and propped the old man up against the counter for a better look. The marshal’s jaw got harder and whiter as he repeated that it was a Mexican job. The town was crowding in. Bob Leadley noted that his boy, Bart, was standing around. ‘Go on back home and get your breakfast, Bart,’ he said. The whole white settlement was inside or at the store doors by this time. Mort Cotton’s voice seemed to find the strangest hush for this sentence: ‘They needn’t have killed him. Old Batten would have given them all that they took--at least trusted ’em for what they took--’ It sounded so innocent and mournful, but it was like blowing on fire--the effect on the crowd. Every one was thinking something of the same kind, and a sort of hell took hold and united them--the same contagion that makes a mob. The cask had ceased to drip--not yet five in the morning. No one knew how much money Batten had in the place.