He managed to get erect again, but when he reached the low flight of steps to the front door he was reeling drunkenly from side to side. He fumbled for the knob, and it turned with a grating sound. "Hold on! Keep out!" shrilled a voice inside. "We got guns here. Keep out, you dirty bum!" The door fell open, and he found himself confronted by what seemed to him a dazzling torrent of light and a host of human faces. He drew himself up beside the doorway. "Gentlemen," said Andrew, "I am not a bum. I am worth five thousand dollars to the man who turns me over, dead or alive, to the sheriff. My name is Andrew Lanning." At that the faces became a terrible rushing and circling flare, and the lights went out with equal suddenness. He was left in total darkness, falling through space; but, at his last moment of consciousness, he felt arms going about him, arms through which his bulk kept slipping down, and below him was a black abyss. CHAPTER 23 It was a very old man who held, or tried to hold, Andrew from falling to the floor. His shoulders shook under the burden of the outlaw, and the burden, indeed, would have slumped brutally to the floor, had not the small ten-year-old boy, whom Andrew had seen on the bay mare, come running in under the arms of the old man. With his meager strength he assisted, and the two managed to lower the body gently. The boy was frightened. He was white at the sight of the wounds, and the freckles stood out in copper patches from his pallor. Now he clung to the old man. "Granddad, it's the gent that tried to buy Sally!" The old man had produced a murderous jackknife with a blade that had been ground away to the disappearing point by years of steady grinding. "Get some wood in the stove," he commanded. "Fire her up, quick. Put on some water. Easy, lad!" The room became a place of turmoil with the clatter of the stove lids being raised, the clangor of the kettle being filled and put in place. By the time the fire was roaring and the boy had turned, he found the bandages had been taken from the body of the stranger and his grandfather was studying the smeared naked torso with a sort of detached, philosophic interest. With the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he was pressing deeply into the left shoulder of Andrew. "Now, there's an arm for you, Jud," said the old man. "See them long, stringy muscles in the forearm? If you grow up and have muscles like them, you can call yourself a man. And you see the way his stomach caves in? Aye, that's a sign! And the way his ribs sticks out--and just feel them muscles on the point of his shoulder--Oh, Jud, he would of made a prime wrestler, this fine bird of ours!" "It's like touchin' somethin' dead, granddad," said the boy. "I don't dast to do it!"