"Then both him and her beats it like the mill-tails of hell! And that part's natural enough, him figuring he's killed the sheriff, and her figuring she's plumb killed you. They stampeded into the brush, ducking out toward the timber-lands where it was darkest, a bunch of hollering fools after them." "And Jim Taggart?" The "boys" whose presence Billy Winch had requested came hurrying in at the hall door, excitement and alarm shining in their eyes. One glance reassured them, and while Dick Ross gave expression to his relief in a windy sigh and sought hastily for materials to build him a cigarette to replace that which he had dropped as he raced here, Charley Peters stood and mopped at his forehead with an enormous dingy blue handkerchief and grinned. Billy Winch, who had the trick of pithy brevity when there was need of it, made his wants known sharply, and the two men, their spurs still dragging and clanking after them, hastened away for basin and soap and whatever else of Winch's first-aid materials might be had at hand. In the meantime, Winch was yanking a sheet off Lynette Brooke's bed, and ripping it into tatters for his bandages and rags and what he termed "mops and applications." "It ain't necessary to probe for the bullet," he admitted, almost regretfully. "But I might poke around in there a mite, while the hole's good and wide open, to make sure that a piece of your shirt or something didn't get lodged inside...." "I'll break your damned neck for trying it," threatened Standing. "Well," sighed Winch, "all I'll do then is just take a pack-needle and put in a stitch or two. Remember when Dick Ross's horse...." "You'll take some warm water and soap and wash me off," said Standing emphatically. "Then you'll make me one of your infernal compresses out of clean cloth; and after that you'll leave me alone.... Tell me about my horse, old Sunlight. So Gallup had him killed for me?" "Somebody pretty near blowed his head off with buckshot," Billy Winch told him, and again twinkling fires of anger flickered in the little man's eyes. "If Gallup didn't have the job done, who did? I ask you!" Timber-Wolf stared at the wall. Within him, too, rose scorching anger, that resurgent bitter flood which was not lessened now because in the first place it had leaped upon him unexpectedly, and had thus been the cause of his humiliation. But within him there was another emotion, one of deep grief; for he loved a good horse, no man more. And Sunlight was his pet and his trusted friend, and had been, for many a wilderness week, his only companion. "You didn't leave him suffering any, Bill?" His voice sounded cold and impersonal and matter-of-fact. Yet Billy Winch understood and answered softly: "I stopped long enough to make sure, Timber. But I didn't have to shoot him; he just rared his head up and looked at me straight in the eye, as man to man, so help me God, and fell back ... dead. No; he didn't suffer much."