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 throbbed with a quickening beat like the desire that increased in him to perfect that plan for night. His wound was painful; his tongue felt like dry sand.

Strange how that little wound in his shoulder kept on bleeding. Time and again he shifted when he found himself sitting in a puddle of blood. It kept running down, and running down, in a way to provoke a stout fellow like Bill Dunham. That burning in his pleural cavity was still there, evidence of a slow leak internally. It was a pain so hot and terrific as to seem the pure flame of pain. Alcohol poured into his chest could not have set up a torture more acute, he thought, wondering how a man's blood out of its proper place could bring him so much agony.

When he looked out, peering cautiously around the corner of his barrier, things wavered as if the heat glimmered between him and what he could see, twisting them out of shape. They seemed to be keeping pretty quiet out there; he wondered if they had given it up and gone away. He moved a bale of hay; it toppled and fell, tumbling through the door to the ground. They began to shoot, thinking he was coming out.

No, they had not given it up. They were there, viciously and persistently there, dogging him without a quarrel to back them, laying for him in pure meanness without an excuse that would turn an ant. If he ever got clear of there and out where he could throw his feet, there would be a reckoning with that gang, especially the man that shot him in the back, shot him in the back—the back—shot him in the back.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, vexed at that