Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/188

 What wild-rising thoughts press into the compass of a breath when a man flees the outreaching hand of death! In a yard Barrett reviewed the affairs of the Elk Mountain Cattle Company from its beginning to that day; reviewed his own life, its mistakes, its hidden things, its hopes and ambitions now so far away. Alma Nearing, Dan Gustin, Fred Grubb, all leaped up and whirled in the fast-spinning reel of panoramic review, the hot, burning urge of life speeding him on toward the open door.

It seemed as though his breast must burst in the pressure of that perilous flight, all life concentrated there, big, pulse-quickened, ready to leap away from the broken citadel which it warmed and sanctified. Dale Findlay was firing now, and Barrett was still a rod from the door.

At the very threshold the pang of a bullet smote him. The pain of it was as if a redhot bayonet had been plunged into his breast. Barrett sank to his knees, the day suddenly darkening, a hand thrown out to the doorpost; he fell within the door, arms spread as if to embrace the shelter his striving could not win in time.

But the life, the soul, that mysterious essence that quickens brain and heart, had fled for only a moment, as swallows fly in consternation at evening from a familiar resting-place at the fall of a bit of mortar, a fragment of soot. Death had not won dominion yet; the pale soul came fluttering back to its seat.

At the sound of a horse galloping into the dooryard, Barrett drew himself into the cabin, staggered to his