And with her eyes large and grave upon him she answered: "I wonder if I can!"
Butch Conklin looked up, raising his bandaged head slowly, like a white flag of truce, with a stain of red growing through the cloth. He stared at the two, raised a hand to his head as though to rub away the dream, found a pain too real for a dream, and then, like a crab which has grown almost too old to walk, waddled on hands and knees, slowly, from the room and melted silently into the dark beyond.
CHAPTER XVIII
FOOLISH HABITS
A sharp noise of running feet leaped from the dust of the street and clattered through the doorway; the two turned. A swarthy man, broad of shoulder, was the first, and afterward appeared Nash.
"Conklin?" called Deputy Glendin, and swept the room with his startled glance. "Where's Conklin?"
He was not there; only a red stain remained on the floor to show where he had lain.
"Where's Conklin?" called Nash.
"I'm afraid," whispered Bard quickly to the girl, "that it was more than a game of suppose."
He said easily to the other two: "He had enough. His share of trouble came to-night; I let him go."