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Now the Yusts suspected him of having informed; it was but a matter of time before their stupid brains would be convinced of that fact; then they would strike — with a gun. A pellet of metal would drive through Owen Sack’s tissues as one had driven through Cardwell’s…

He got up from the chair and set about packing such of his belongings as he intended taking with him — to where? It didn’t matter. One place was like another — a little of peace and comfort, and then the threat of another gun, to send him elsewhere. Baltimore, New South Wales, north Queensland, Brazil, California, here — thirty years of it! He was old now and his legs were stiff for flight, but running had become an integral part of him.

He packed a little breathlessly, his fingers fumbling clumsily in their haste.

Dusk was thickening in the valley of the Kootenai when Owen Sack, bent beneath the blanketed pack across his shoulders, tramped over the bridge into Dime. He had remained in his cabin until the last minute, so that he might catch the stage which would carry him to the railroad just before it left, avoiding farewells or embarrassing meetings. He hurried now.

But, again, luck ran against him.

As he turned the corner of the New Dime Hotel toward the stage terminus — two doors beyond Henny Upshaw’s soft-drink parlour and poolroom—he spied Rip Yust coming down the street toward him. Yust’s face, he could see, was red and swollen, and Yust’s walk was a swagger. Yust was drunk.

Owen Sack halted in the middle of the sidewalk, and realised immediately that that was precisely the wrong thing to do. Safety lay — if safety lay anywhere now — in going on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening.

He crossed the street to the opposite sidewalk, cursing himself for this open display of his desire to avoid the other, but nevertheless unable to keep his legs from hurrying him across the dusty roadway. Perhaps, he thought, Rip Yust’s whisky-clouded eyes would not see him hurrying toward the stage depot with a pack on his back. But even while the hope rose in him he knew it for a futile, childish one.

Rip Yust did see him, and came to the curb on his own side of the street, to bellow:

“Hey, you! Where you going?”

Owen Sack became motionless, a frightened statue. Fear froze his mind — fear and thoughts of Cardwell.

Yust grinned stupidly across the street, and repeated:

“Where you going?”

Owen Sack tried to answer, to say something — safety seemed to lie in words — but, though he did achieve a sound, it was inarticulate, and would have told the other nothing, even if it had travelled more than ten feet from the little man’s throat.

Yust laughed boomingly. He was apparently in high good humour.

“Now, you mind what I told you this afternoon,” he roared, wagging a thick forefinger at Owen Sack. “If I find that you done it —”

The thick forefinger flashed back to tap the left breast of his coat.

Owen Sack screamed at the suddenness of the gesture — a thin, shrill scream of terror, which struck amusingly upon the big man’s drunken fancy.

Laughter boomed out of his throat again, and his gun came into his hand. His brother’s arrest and Owen Sack’s supposed part in that arrest were, for the time, forgotten in his enjoyment of the little man’s ridiculous fright.

With the sight of the gun, Owen Sack’s last shred of sanity departed. Terror had him fast. He tried to plead, but his mouth could not frame the words. He tried to raise both his hands high above his head in the universal posture of submission, a posture that had saved him many times before. But the strap holding his pack hampered him. He tried to loosen the strap, to fling it off.

To the alcohol-muddled eyes and brain of the man across the street Owen Sack’s right hand was trying to get beneath his coat on the left side. Rip Yust could read but one meaning into that motion — the little man was going for his gun.