Page:RidersOfSilences - Max Brand.djvu/87

Rh from many years of exposure to the wind and sun. At the same time there was a peculiar fineness about the boy. His feet were astonishingly small and the hands thin and slender for all their supple strength. And his neck was not bony, as it is in most youths at this gawky age, but smoothly rounded.

Men grow big of bone and sparse of flesh in the mountain desert. It was the more surprising to Pierre to see this young fellow with the marvelously delicate-cut features. By some freak of nature here was a place where the breed ran to high blood.

The cleaning completed, the boy tossed the butt of the gun to his shoulder and squinted down the barrel. Then he loaded the magazine, weighted the gun deftly at the balance, and dropped the rifle across his knees.

"Morning," said Pierre le Rouge cheerily, and swung off the bunk to the floor. "How old's the gun?"

The boy, without the slightest show of excitement, snapped the butt to his shoulder and drew a bead on Pierre's breast.

"Sit down before you get all heated up," said a musical voice. "There's nobody waiting for you on horseback."

And Pierre sat down, partly because Western men never argue a point when that little black hole is staring them in the face, partly because he remembered with a rush that the last time he had fully possessed his consciousness he had been lying in the snow with the cross gripped hard and the toppling mass of the landslide above him. All that had