him, bent him backward, lifted him, flung him a clean back somersault and left him sprawled senseless, his face to the ground.
A gasp of astonishment, not unblended with admiration, greeted this feat of strength. The onlookers stood back from Sawyer as men avoid a dead body, no man offering a hand to lift him.
Hartwell had lost his hat. He looked around for it, his head swimming, his forehead throbbing as if he had been hammered with a maul. One eye was so swollen that he could see through only a slit, the other misty from blood that ran into it from some injury in his bruised forehead.
Somebody came forward with the hat and gave it to him, silently. Duncan held out the belt with the big dangling gun. Hartwell girded himself with it again, put on his hat, although it seemed to stand ridiculously small on top of the great enlargement that he imagined his head had undergone, faced about, and walked away. He said no word to anybody; not one of them said a word to him. His way led him past the spot where Sawyer had fallen, his face in the mud of the trampled road.
Hartwell's after-recollection of the short walk from the battle-ground to the creek was as if he had risen in delirium from a bed of pain and gone wandering. It seemed a long distance to him, and that terrible deep sickness was over him again, as if
