"It will start as soon as the Three Bar doesn't need me," she said. "And last a long time."
Again a lane opened through the crowd, affording a view of the door. Deane saw the face outside in the night, and a foot or more below if some bright object glinted in the dim light which filtered through. The music ceased and the chant of the roulette croupier began, mingling with the smooth purr of the ivory ball. There came a sudden hush from the vicinity of the rear door, a hush that spread rapidly throughout the room, so swift are the perceptions of a frontier gathering.
Old Rile Foster stood just inside, his gun half-raised before him. Canfield and Lang stood together in the center of the floor, apart from the rest and with no others in line beyond them. Rile tossed a boot heel on to the floor and as it rolled toward the two men he shot Canfield through the chest. Lang's gun crashed almost with his own. Rile's knees sagged under him and he pitched face down on the floor, his arms sprawled out before him.
The surge of the crowd, pressing back out of line, threw the albino on the edge of it, his big form towering alone.
The old man raised his head from the floor and crooked his wrist with the last of his ebbing strength.
"Four for Bangs," he said, and shot Harper between the eyes.
XI
The two loggers had finished cutting their quota of timber for the homestead cabins and the white peeled logs lay piled and ready to be snaked down to the Three Bar on the first heavy snows of fall. The choppers had transferred their operations to the lower broken slopes which they scoured for the scattered cedars of the foothills, cutting them for fence posts and piling them in spots accessible to the wagons to be hauled whenever the mule teams could be spared.
The acreage of plowed ground increased day by day and would continue till frost claimed the ground. As soon as the brush was burnt the mule teams pulled heavy log drags across the field, pulverizing the lumps and leveling inequalities of the surface.