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Tony rehearsed the steps ahead of him. The swift, ominously silent ride out into the country. Then when a sufficiently deserted spot had been reached, he would be kicked out of the car, riddled with bullets and left dead in a ditch, to be found by some passerby or perhaps picked to pieces by buzzards if the place were remote enough.

A fellow had some chance in a street gun-fight, no matter what the odds against him, but "a ride" was more inexorable than the death sentence imposed by a jury and court. For there was no ap­peal from it. There was no possibility of escape from it. It was carried out with the cool, precise deadliness of a state execution. And it was even more inevitable—at least it always had been.

A nervous or sensitive man, faced with cruel and certain death within an hour, would have shouted, screamed, pleaded, perhaps battled his captors with that reckless strength born of despair. But Tony was neither nervous nor sensitive. A man who