Letchie turned his thin smile to the others. ‘I guess you’ve heard that. I guess we’ve got what we came for. I guess we’ve heard from his own lips, he was one of the three.’ Bob Leadley wasn’t right in his own head; he knew just enough to know that one thing. He saw his son looking down at Palto. He saw--a kind of humor about it--that Bart hadn’t mixed in the pursuit with any sacred idea of the law’s vengeance. Now the upshot of the whole matter from Letchie Welton: ‘... accordin’ to law, we can’t finish him here and be done with it. Bein’ still alive, we’ve got to fix to take him back to where a court is. Only if he should try to escape--we could put a bullet through him; but he won’t do that, will you, Palto?’ ‘No, Señor!’ sliding away from Welton’s boot. ‘We aren’t the court and can’t hang him here, and there’s no shack in this hole of a town that will hold him. Our horses are done for--they won’t get back to Bismo--’ Letchie’s words died out of Bob Leadley’s ears. He was trying to find himself. He was seeing old Batten’s white hair, not combed as usual; he was seeing his own boy--a look in Bart’s face, different from ever before. The hard white curve of Letchie’s jaw was before his eyes and words again: ‘I, for one, ain’t sittin’ up on guard to-night. I’m not askin’ you fellows to do what I won’t do myself.’ Something was crowding for utterance to Bob Leadley’s lips, but Welton’s voice kept it from coming clear. They might be here in Red Ante for days, while some one rode back to Bismo for fresh provisions and horses. ‘... He ain’t worth it--no greaser is. Only one way--to fix him so he can’t get away--’ Now Bart spoke up: ‘I’ll stand guard over him to-night. I don’t feel so done out--’ The father was glad in a crippled sort of fashion, glad but afraid. ‘I guess not,’ said Letchie. ‘Wouldn’t look so pretty when we got back, to have you tell ’em you sat rifle-up over the prisoner while we got our beauty sleep back.... No, I’m figurin’ out a different way from what I saw up yonder--just as we broke into town.’ He meant the blacksmith shop. Bob Leadley saw Mort Cotton standing in the dark like a dirt-stained corpse. It might have been Batten himself. ‘I won’t take part in it,’ Bob thought. ‘I ain’t marshal to say what’s what, but I won’t take no part.’ Bart was looking his way, but Bob didn’t turn to meet his son’s eyes. ‘I ain’t a man of law,’ he was thinking. At the same time he felt Bart’s eyes turning to him persistently, but he couldn’t look. ‘I ain’t a man of law.’ The marshal was managing it alone.... Bob had been famished riding into town, but the stuff left in his saddle-bags tasted like worms to his tongue, and the water, as if running out of a sore. Though he was half dead for it, there was no sleep--with that racket from the blacksmith shop down the dirt road of Red Ante. He didn’t meet Bart’s eyes again. It was as if he had said good-bye to his son for life.