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 who stood between him and his design would be overwhelmed by numbers and slain. If Tom Laylander should fall in defense of his property, as he would surely fall, his death would be on her own hands.

She had little faith in any help coming from the railroaders. She knew them by this time for a heady, impulsive class of men, easily moved to hot resentment, as quickly cooled by a little lapse of time. Only Windy Moore was down at the stock yards watching with Laylander, she knew; poor old Windy, who very likely would break and run at the first shot. It was a great scheme they had for blowing the whistle, but it would need more than a whistle sounded at an unseasonable hour to rouse a crowd of sleepy railroaders from their beds to take up their guns in defense of a man whom they so lately had contemned and mocked.

Louise was quartered on the side of the hotel that overlooked the road leading into town, the depot and the stock yards, as the loading pens were generally called. The pens were too far away to be seen through the dark; she could only imagine Tom Laylander sitting on the fence as she had seen him at dusk, voluble, vain Windy Moore beside him, doubtless more of a bore than a comfort in this hour of uncertainty.

There was nothing she could do to help him; there was no certainty that he would accept her help, if she could summon forty gun-clever men. Tom believed her a sort of minor crook, a person whose standard of rectitude was very ignoble and low. Her impatience