"It got about afterwards that Emory wouldn't consent till he saw the devil to pay in Shorty's earnestness, and they swore with their fists in each other's to carry the thing through to the finish. The date and hour were arranged for the following Sunday night at eight, and they drank to it with gall in the cup.
"When the evening came the clock had already struck eight when Stokes reached the Blanchard house.
"The lights from the room fell over the porch, and from the shadow of the steps he saw the something that in all the world he couldn't bear to see,—Emory crossing the room to take Grace Blanchard in his arms; Emory with passion paling his face and Grace Blanchard in the beauty of a disturbing humility.
"He cursed as he watched them cling to each other, and he cursed his way back to the saloons and his Mariposa mining.
"The next day he turned up again in the settlement, with liquor enough aboard to put a wheel in his head, and, after a losing fling at the tables, he started to find Emory.
"After a little ineffectual riding, he leaped from the back of his vicious-eyed piebald at the corner that bulged thickest with saloons, and stood close to the stirrup with his hand on his hip. Some one who noticed him said his face had the steely intensity of a razor edge.
"Then out of the crowd, unconscious, with the music of love in his heart, swung Ned Emory. His hat was pushed back on his fair hair, and he was whistling the overflow out of his veins.
"In one instant a bullet rang through the air, followed by another. Emory fell in his own blood, and a horseman was riding off wildly and safe through the shower of bullets that rained around him. Every man with a cayuse tore in pursuit, but they only brought back eight half-dead horses. Stokes had staked relay beasts at different points along the road, and was then safe in the chaparral cañons toward the north.
"The gambling dens choked up with the crowds; gold-dust was heaped on gold-dust for the reward of the cowardly hound. Murders weren't rare then, but there was only one Ned Emory, remember.
"Four of us wouldn't drop the search. We let the blood-money men get out of the way, and then we worked as we'd toil for only our own.