Yet as he fell, he fired his revolver and John pitched to the ground, his jugular vein severed by the shot.
Beside himself with grief, as he saw the blood spurting from his brother's neck, Jim emptied his revolver at the fast disappearing form of Wright, without stopping him, however.
Tears pouring from his eyes, he turned toward John's dead body, when he heard a gun bark and felt a burning sensation in the fleshy part of his right hip.
"Ed Daniels, I'll have your heart's blood!" he shrieked, as he leaped his horse into the underbrush in the direction from which the sound had come.
Not expecting such a move, the traitor was caught facing the infuriated desperado and before he could pull the trigger of his pistol a bullet crashed through his forehead.
Satisfied with the killing of the man who was responsible for his brother's death, Jim returned to the lifeless body, picked it up tenderly and, with the blood drenching his clothes, rode with it in his arms into his uncle's door-yard.
Tarrying only long enough to carry the corpse inside the house and to give instructions to the miser to have it properly buried, on pain of death, Jim tossed him a bill to defray the expenses, took John's money from his clothes, kissed his lifeless lips, rushed to his horse, vaulted into the saddle and dashed from the yard, scattering the neighbours, who had been attracted by the firing, right and left as he quickly vanished from sight in the woods.