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 by a pressing crowd. He put up his gun, expecting the marshal to arrest him.

The marshal walked over to the place where the victim of that lame-going joke lay, his badge flashing in the lamplight as he stooped. He seemed to be satisfied that it was a complete job, such as turned out by his own workmanly hand. He turned to Dunham.

"Are you the feller that done this shootin'?" he asked, his voice singularly small and nasal, an indescribable sneer in it that seemed to challenge Dunham's manhood as it belittled the deed.

"I'm sorry to say I am," Dunham replied, his voice husky, and strange in his own ears.

"There's no case against that man, Kellogg," somebody spoke from the door of the hardware store. "We saw the whole business, from start to finish."

"Who started it?" the marshal demanded, so ungraciously it amounted to a challenge of the speaker's veracity.

"They did. There was a whole bunch of them pickin' on him," a different voice replied, a girlish voice that vibrated with excitement. She was so near him Dunham fancied he could hear her breathe.

Dunham turned to see who his defenders were, providentially raised up, it seemed to him, out of his naked world. One was the proprietor of the store, evidently, an elderly short man in shirt sleeves, wearing a canvas apron such as carpenters use for carrying nails. The other was a girl in a riding habit of brown cloth edged with red. She wore leather cuffs and a sombrero; there was a gun swinging at her waist, a stubby quirt looped