The man turned his drawn face toward me, and tried to smile as he said: “I guess you’re very good. Hope you don’t bear malice. You oughtn’t to anyhow—nearly broke my neck when you fired me through the doorway. All in the way of business, and I’m corralled now.”
I bent my head with a friendly gesture, for even I could read death in his face, and the outlaw, glancing toward Grace, added: 90
“If I’d known you, Missy, we’d never have held up this homestead. White people all through, and you’re a prairie daisy. What made me do it? Well, I guess that’s a long story, and some of it might scare you. A big man froze me off my land, and some one rebranded my few head of stock. Law! we don’t count much on that; it’s often the biggest rascals corral the offices, and we just laid for them with the rifle. They were too many for us—and this is the end of it.”
Grace moved toward him whispering something I could not catch, but the man smiled feebly, and I heard the grim answer:
“No; I guess it’s rather too late for that. I lived my own way, and I can die that way too. Don’t back down on one’s partners; kind of mean, isn’t it? And if it’s true what you’re saying I’ll just accept my sentence. Going out before the morning; but I sent two of the men who robbed me to perdition first.”
Ormond raised his hand for silence, and again I could hear the shrilling of the bitter wind that was never still. Then he said softly: “You are only exciting him, and had better go,” and with a last glance at Grace’s slender figure stooping beside the bed I went out softly.
It was nearly midnight and a cold creepiness pervaded everything when he joined the rest of us round the stove.
“Gone!” he said simply. “Just clenched his hand and died. There was some fine material wasted in that man. Well, I think he was wronged somehow, and I’m sorry for him.”
We turned away in silence, for a shadow rested upon Carrington, while the outlaw lay in state in the homestead he had helped to rob, until the Northwest Police bore what was left of him away. But before that time we rode back to Fairmead.