The Gallup House had become a vortex of violent excitement. It was shouted out that two men were dead, Bruce Standing shot by the new adventuress whom many had noted; Jim Taggart killed as he sought to put her under arrest. Voices clashed and so did thoughts and purposes. Men streamed out into the firelit road; they heard running feet marking the way the two fugitives had taken, and started headlong in pursuit, stumbling and falling in the dark, and for the first few moments making slight headway. Others, Gallup among them, were already with Taggart, lifting him up and bearing him off to a bed. Still others, hearkening to the strange word that a woman had killed Bruce Standing, were suddenly charged with the morbid curiosity to look upon this man dead. They found their way to the lighted window through which Lynette Brooke had escaped, and through it made their way into the room, until the small space was thick with their jostling bodies. All the while Billy Winch was beating at the door, yelling curses and, at last, when he heard them within, commanding and imploring to be let in. A man, stepping over Timber-Wolf's body, obeyed and Billy Winch hopped in. Immediately he was down at his chief's side, squatting, after his own awkward fashion, upon a knee and balanced by a stub of a leg. "He _ain't_ dead!" Billy Winch's breath was expelled in a long, grateful sigh, which, before his lungs flattened, was choked by a nervous giggle. "I'm here, Timber," he said softly. "You know me, old boy!" "You damn little fool," was Bruce Standing's grunted answer. Yet his voice was gentle and his eyes for one rare and fleeting instant as soft as a lover's. Billy Winch, a man of resource, was now himself again, cool and past all silly sentiment. He turned from the fallen man to the crowding onlookers, and his eyes darkened with fury. He snatched up the rifle which Standing had let fall, and, still kneeling, whipped it up over his head, brandishing it like a war club. "Out of this, every one of you!" he shouted at them. "Give him air and give me room to work in, else I bash your brains out!" Had he been less in earnest some man of them might have found occasion to mark the absurdity of a cripple, squatting on the floor, waving a gun over his head and ordering them about. But as things were, no man appeared to glimpse this angle of it. One by one, with his eyes and the eyes of Timber-Wolf glaring at them, they went hastily out through the window. "Ought to get a doctor in a hurry," one of the retreating men was suggesting.