By now he had the shirts torn from top to bottom, and stood back, looking appraisingly at the broad, naked back and the small hole which a bullet had drilled. Against the great area of flesh, as white as a girl's and smooth and clean with vigorous health, the smear of blood, itself red with that same perfection of health, gave the wound an appearance of ten times its real gravity. But Winch was accustomed to blood, and knew that Bruce Standing could lose more of it than could most men and be little the worse for the loss. He diagnosed the case aloud, muttering thoughtfully: "Thirty-two caliber, to begin with; a thirty-two ain't nothing, Timber. Now, if it had been a forty-five, at that close-up range.... Well, you see you was standing half-way slanting; it took you under that big shoulder muscle and drilled in and hit a rib, one of the high-up ones, and kept on going, sort of skirting round, skating on a rib, and popped out under your arm. Lift it a bit? That's it. A clean hole. I tell you, either you sort of slipped and fell, or it was the impack that knocked you over.... The boys will be here any minute, and will scare up a bar of castile soap for me and something to make a regular poultice, what we calls a comprest, you know; I can make one out of most anything; remember Sam True's thoroughbred stallion that got all cut to hell last fall, and I made him a comprest out of sawdust! You remind me," added Winch thoughtfully, drawing off one of his hopping paces, to take in with an admiring and practised eye the now virtually nude torso, a white, smooth-running engine of power and endurance, "of a wild stallion mostly as much as a man, anyhow. A good smear of mustang liniment on that shoulder, a application, you know; and a dose of physic and a couple days' rest and careful diet, and you'll be as good as new...." "What happened in the other room?" demanded Standing, deaf to Winch's mutterings. "After she went through the window?" "She came busting in where Deveril and I was, her eyes the size of two new dish pans. I put in _new_ because they was shining like it too; I thought she'd seen the devil. She has a gun in her hand and she yells out, 'Save me!' or something like that. And after her, doubled-up running, comes Jim Taggart, yelling at her: 'I got you for killing Bruce Standing!' And then that cool-headed, hot-hearted young Baby Devil of yours grabs the gun out of her hand and whangs Taggart over the head with it so that he drops dead in his tracks. And I hear a man say he is dead, too; but I don't stop to see. Don't seem natural, and yet a man's close to mortal danger if he gets whanged with any hard object, such as steel gun-barrels, on the head, close up to the temple; we call it the parrytal bone, you know, and I've known men and even horses that was killed so quick...." "Then what?" snapped Timber-Wolf.