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 his own hand, offered only a slight diversion, not sufficient, indeed, to provoke a laugh. Eudora Ellison looked at him again with unfathomable astonishment in her not altogether unsophisticated eyes. She had heard many tales of violent deeds, she had known men who had taken the lives of others in more or less fair combat as such things were considered in the ethics of the range, but she never had imagined a man who could turn from shooting even a thief and put it out of his mind as easily as this strange Englishman.

She wondered if he had killed so many men that he had grown hardened to it, like the town marshal of Dodge City, who had been known to rise in the middle of his dinner to remove one or more discordant members of his wild society, and return to his steak with appetite unshaken. It was said he was a mild-spoken man, such as this one, with a humane and kindly smile.

Certainly the man who had fallen before Simpson's gun—or rather her gun in Simpson's hands—had stolen her horse, insulted her and her mother and treated the stranger with a contempt that only blood would atone. She was not sorry for the thief, but in cooler mind now she regretted the necessity that had forced this mild-mannered stranger to such hard measure.

If it had been one of the cowboys of the range her concern would have been slight. They were of the type who could slay and sheathe their guns with a laugh. They were crude unlettered men, schooled in the hard usages of frontier life, their sensibilities so embryonic or so atrophied from disuse as to be proof against remorse. Not so this thin-visaged stranger who bore the stamp of refine-