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Steve felt himself growing warm and angry.

“Maybe you’re right,” he said slowly, with deliberate intent to bring this thing between them to a crisis, “but I’ve never had enough experience with property to know how I’d feel about being deprived of it. But suppose I had a — well, say — a white vest that I treasured. And suppose a man slapped my face and threatened to spoil the vest. I reckon I’d forget all about protecting the vest in my hurry to tangle with him. ”

Larry laughed sharply.

Steve caught the wrist that flashed up, and pinned it to Ormsby’s side with a hand that much spinning of a heavy stick had muscled with steel.

“Easy,” he said into the slitted, dancing eyes; “easy now. ”

Larry Ormsby’s white teeth flashed under his moustache.

“Righto,” he smiled. “If you’ll turn my wrist loose, I’d like to shake hands with you — a sort of antebellum gesture. I like you, Threefall; you’re going to add materially to the pleasures of Izzard. ”

In his room on the third floor of the Izzard Hotel, Steve Threefall undressed slowly, hampered by a stiff left arm and much thinking. Matter for thought he had in abundance. Larry Ormsby slapping his father’s face and threatening him with an automatic; Larry Ormsby and the girl in confidential conversation; Kamp dying in a dark street, his last words lost in the noise of the marshal’s arrival; Nora Vallance giving him an empty revolver, and persuading him to let a burglar escape; the watch on the floor and the looting of the blind man’s savings; the caravan Larry Ormsby had led toward the desert; the talk in the Vauxhall, with its exchange of threats.

Was there any connection between each of these things and the others? Or were they simply disconnected happenings? If there was a connection — and the whole of that quality in mankind which strives toward simplification of life’s phenomena, unification, urged him to belief in a connection — just what was it? Still puzzling, he got into bed; and then out again quickly. An uneasiness that had been vague until now suddenly thrust itself into his consciousness. He went to the door, opened and closed it. It was a cheaply carpentered door, but it moved easily and silently on well-oiled hinges.

“I reckon I’m getting to be an old woman,” he growled to himself; “but I’ve had all I want to-night. ”

He blocked the door with the dresser, put his stick where he could reach it quickly, got into bed again, and went to sleep.

A pounding on the door awakened Steve at nine o’clock the next morning. The pounder was one of Fernie’s subordinates, and he told Steve that he was expected to be present at the inquest into Kamp’s death within an hour. Steve found that his wounded arm bothered him little; not so much as a bruised area on one shoulder — another souvenir of the fight in the street.

He dressed, ate breakfast in the hotel cafe, and went up to Ross Amthor’s ‘undertaking parlour,’ where the inquest was to be held.

The coroner was a tall man with high, narrow shoulders and a sallow, puffy face, who sped proceedings along regardless of the finer points of legal technicality. Steve told his story; the marshal told his, and then produced a prisoner — a thick-set Austrian who seemingly neither spoke nor understood English. His throat and lower face were swathed in white bandages.

“Is this the one you knocked down?” the coroner asked.

Steve looked at as much of the Austrian’s face as was visible above the bandages.

“I don’t know. I can’t see enough of him. ”