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 ment, seemed to fill him so completely that it spilled over with every move.

Windy Moore had not been a participant in the discussion of the mysterious twenty-two. He did not know, in truth whether it was a twenty-two or a forty-four that had stopped the cowman in his galloping charge. When Windy mounted to the pile of ties to fire the last shot in the battle, the sight of Withers lying in the road a few feet away, that frightful black hole in his forehead, had been too much for him. He never had seen a man struck down in the vigor of life in that summary way before. It shook him to the foundation with a revulsion that made him sick.

The romance was gone out of gun-handling for Windy Moore. His strength was spent with his courage; he was white, weak in the legs, dizzy and upset. He went ahead of the men who were carrying the cowman to the hotel, his brave bulldog forgotten in his cold and nerveless hand; he struck for the stairs with weaving and uncertain legs, like a man staggering across the deck of a ship, blind in the great sickness that makes the world a heaving, horrible, hateful place.

Windy Moore did not wait for the verdict of life or death in Cal Withers's case. A man hiding a mortal wound could not have gone with more uncertain step, with more frozen fixity of glazed eye, or sickness of every atom of his body than Windy Moore as he dragged his heavy feet up the stairs. He got to his room at last, where the sweat of his great terror burst from him in relief. He shut the door behind him, and