with the little twenty-two by making a target of a cornstalk stripped down to the white, brittle core. That is a narrow streak when it comes to shooting at it with a pistol, great or small. Bill's way of doing it was to start rather close, backing off as he fired, cutting the crisp pulp as true as it could have been done with a knife.
Over and over he practiced this marksmanship in the frosty fields, backing off and shooting, running forward and shooting, hopping and wheeling and shooting, lying down and springing up as from sleep and shooting, becoming so apt at the business in time that the ordinary tricks of the gunman offered him no difficulty at all.
Birds on the wing, rabbits on the run, Bill pegged with the easy confidence of his inherited deftness which incessant practice had perfected into an art. After a due time Bill bought another gun, a whopping big one, as it had looked to him at that time, a very moderately sized one as compared to that he had wrenched from the foolish cowboy in Poteet's saloon. The new one was a thirty-eight, a handsome blued-steel weapon with long barrel, self-everything but self-loading. Bill always felt he'd have time to attend to that as needed, anyhow.
It was this gun Bill had brought with him to Pawnee Bend. It was safe in his suitcase at the hotel when he encountered the cowboy who had made the mistake that better and worse men before his day had made—of judging a man by his drinks. Bill never had carried a gun around with him; he never had figured on doing so until it should become necessary to the busi-
