Mrs. Arlington would have interfered, but Merry declared he had sworn out the warrant for Dodge's arrest, and she saw it was useless.
"Madam," said Frank, "I will leave you alone with your daughter. When she has told you all, you will be ready, I am confident, to prosecute Eliot Dodge. I shall then withdraw my charge and permit you to have him arrested. In the meantime I bid you good day. I shall be in this hotel for the next day or so."
He bowed gracefully to both Mrs. Arlington and June and left the room.
When there was plenty of time, Frank and his friends talked it over. He told them of his experience in the dance-room, and they told him how they had lingered near, ready to rush to his rescue. When they heard the sounds of the quarrel between Cimarron Bill and Handsome Charley they hurried to the door, but there they halted, for they looked in and saw nothing of Frank. Thus it was that they beheld the shooting of Bill as he tried to draw on Charley. He was shot down from behind by Charley's tools, and they fired several bullets into his body as he lay weltering on the floor.
Frank shook his head as he heard this account of Bill's end.
"He was a bad man, a very bad man," he said; "but somehow I'm sorry that he met his end that way. They had to shoot him from the rear. Not one of them dared pull on him face to face."
Frank received a brief letter from Mrs. Arlington, thanking him for what he had done for her daughter. Not one word did she say of her own malevolence toward him, not one word of the manner in which she had wronged him. And the doctor, who brought the letter, told Merry that she was in such a precarious condition that she could not write more, nor could she be seen by any one but June.
Frank smiled grimly, disdainfully, over the letter, then deliberately tore it into shreds.