Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/258

 Zang Whistler was looking for Original Bill Blunt. Haply found, the issues of life and death between them would hang on the balance of a hair. But at that hour the object of the outlaw's search was riding alone the salt-lick trail away out under the stars where somewhere in the bad lands beyond Crazy Squaw Hilma Ring blundered in the mazes of the night and the illimitable labyrinth of the Big Country.

The sardonic genius of the Big Country had wrought but part of her will in Two Moons that night. There in a whirlpool of her own devising had been sucked all the bitter hates and tiger ferocities she had been brewing out on the clean spaces of the wide range. There she had contrived a blood reckoning on the tally of little pebbles found on dead men's foreheads; a Killer had received in full the harvest of his sowing. A desperate rallying of the range clan had hurled itself in a wave against the wall of its enemies and fallen back broken; even now hurrying groups of horsemen coursed the divides to find refuge from the wrath that seethed under the town's yellow lights. Unstable law, newly come to the Big Country, had been harried and scorned and made a mockery. Anarchy of the wolf pack was abroad.