Texas walked warily through the main street of Cottonwood, where gasoline-lamps on posts made a very good illumination, together with the brightness that radiated from the windows. He kept his hand hovering over his gun, and turned his head this way and that, like a man in the enemy's country where he believes every hand hostile.
He knew himself to be a man marked for destruction. That sentence he had read in the mayor's exclamation of angry disappointment when he found that Hartwell had not been slain, and the look of his eyes the moment that he turned and hid himself in the throng. There would be strain and disquietude, high tension and uncertainty, every hour that he remained in Cottonwood. He considered whether it would not be the best and wisest thing, for his own safety and peace, to leave the town at once.
Then there came flashing back to him the picture of Sallie McCoy as she sat there in her saddle when he stood alone after thrashing the mayor. The warm feeling of pride that had stirred in him then like a heroic resolution expanded over his body again. He felt that the unspoken message that had passed from eye to eye between them in that moment had been a pledge of some undreamed, embryonic thing of the future, still nebulous and misty, still not understood. But of something rest-
