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 padded body as Hall turned in at Old Doc Ross' little plank office next door.

Ross was sitting at his table-topped desk, as Hall had hoped to find him, reading a paper. He was dressed in his garb of sobriety: a heavy, dark suit, stiff-bosomed white shirt with high collar, and the same light-colored sombrero he had worn when he came to shoot Hall out of town. His vest was buttoned to the top, his long coat draped him almost to the floor. In this garb Ross concealed the tops of his boots under the legs of his trousers, after the Missouri fashion. It appeared to add somewhat to his length of legs.

Ross looked up from his reading as Hall swung into the room without a moment's pause at the door, making a poor pretense of going on with it immediately, paying no heed to the younger man's salutation, which was as friendly and cheerful as Hall's somewhat reluctant tongue could pronounce it. But Ross was not to carry it off in that manner of high disdain. Hall had come on the impulse of that flying resolution, and he was going to have an end of it that day.

There was another straight-backed kitchen chair in the office, such as Ross himself occupied, the pioneer doctor's equipment being very meager. This extra chair was the seat of agony that patients occupied for the extraction of teeth, lancing of boils, stitching of wounds, and all the office ministration which Ross's broad field covered. Hall took possession of the chair, put his hat on the desk, and his bag on the floor.

He was indecisive about the way to come to the core of this uncomfortable moral obligation; whether to lead up to it with a sort of local anesthetization of pacific pre-