judiciously, turning up the soil to note its qualities, and chewed pieces of hay from Rawlins' stacks, making quite a neighborly reunion out of it. The dead man in the wagon was the smallest part of their thoughts.
Not so with Rawlins after the coroner, the jurymen and the sheriff had gone back to Lost Cabin, taking the short cut across Galloway's land for the first time in their lives; and Edith had ridden away to the ranch to relieve whatever anxiety her aunt might feel over her unexplained absence. It was a grim and disturbing thing to stand before him, even with the question of justification smoothed away. It would take a long time to wear the hideous accusation from his own conscience, that upbraiding that it might have been avoided, that weighing of values in which his end of the balance seemed to rise so emptily.
An unworthy man, an outlawed man, a vicious and murderous villain. Yet he had been human, worth more at his basest evaluation than the little oblong of semi-arid land that a perverse infatuation had urged this sheep-mad stranger from afar to enter upon in peril and attempt to hold in strife.
There would not be much in that life, hiding out of a night that way like a cat, to wake soon or late with the bold challenge of fire in his eyes. This resistance, this first success, would only embitter them, lending vengeance to their other grievances, fancied or contrived.
So Rawlins reasoned as he made his bed in the buffalo wallow that night. Not in the intention of standing sentinel over his possessions again, for he was weary to the bone. Let them come when they would
