Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/257

 right arm of the law encouraged. "But don't linger too long round town. When things quiet down, if I should find you in Two Moons, why I 'd have to take you up again, Zang. Duty is duty, you know."

The outlaw went out to the shed stable behind the jail to saddle his horse. He found there, hanging on the peg above Hilma's saddle, a blue gingham apron done into a bundle,—the girl's pitiful collection of treasures gathered that day, now seeming ages past, when she had closed her cabin on Teapot and started to ride with him to the Spout. Reverently Zang lifted the bundle to his own saddle horn, then he turned his horse out of the jail yard and down Main Street, still boiling in the afterthroes of the night's passion.

Whipped by a cold and deadly resolve, the big outlaw's eyes under their shadowing hat brim were those of a stalking tiger. They leaped from face to face in the fluxes and eddies of men the pools of light across the road illumined. Though his injured right hand was stiff in splints and bandages, all the power and the cunning of him lay tingling in his ready left. A more dangerous man never ranged Two Moons' single street.