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"I'm the only man here that can save him if he ain't dead already. And if he is dead...."

He hurled himself bodily at the door; he jumped up at it and kicked it with his one heavy boot and, falling, rolled over and crawled to his foot and struck again.

The Gallup House had become a vortex of violent excitement. It was shouted out that two men were dead, Bruce Standing shot by the new adventuress whom many had noted; Jim Taggart killed as he sought to put her under arrest. Voices clashed and so did thoughts and purposes. Men streamed out into the firelit road; they heard running feet marking the way the two fugitives had taken, and started headlong in pursuit, stumbling and falling in the dark, and for the first few moments making slight headway. Others, Gallup among them, were already with Taggart, lifting him up and bearing him off to a bed. Still others, hearkening to the strange word that a woman had killed Bruce Standing, were suddenly charged with the morbid curiosity to look upon this man dead. They found their way to the lighted window through which Lynette Brooke had escaped, and through it made their way into the room, until the small space was thick with their jostling bodies. All the while Billy Winch was beating at the door, yelling curses and, at last, when he heard them within, commanding and imploring to be let in. A man, stepping over Timber-Wolf's body, obeyed and Billy Winch hopped in. Immediately he was down at his chief's side, squatting, after his own awkward fashion, upon a knee and balanced by a stub of a leg.