wouldn't do to take the risk of having it turn out something else. He must keep his hand away from that gun—keep his hand away from that gun!
Shad Brassfield, who had been asleep in the wagon making up what he had lost in the night drive, popped his head out of the front end, boozy with sleep. When he saw the camp had not been assailed by the Texans he hustled over the dashboard and hopped to the ground. He hit it as the last chamber was emptied at Dunham's feet, recognizing the victim of the torment as he struck.
"Well, who—in—the—hell said I was dead!" Shad drawled, with such obfuscated drollery that Dunham himself would have laughed if the joke had been on somebody else.
In the roar that resulted from Shad's ludicrous appearance and rusty, amazed exclamation, which could not have been funnier from the original source, Bill turned to his horse. He stopped a moment before mounting, to turn a look on the two young men who had picked him for easy money. His face was as white as if he had risen from the amputation of a leg without ether, and there was a cold fury in his eyes that made the younger of them catch his breath and start back, his empty gun in his hand.
The older one scowled, sore that their show had fallen so flat. He was cramming cartridges into his gun; he mumbled some malediction under his breath, but there was no blood in his lips, and there was a tremor in his hand.
Moore was braying like a mule in the turmoil of
