doorpost, chewing gum. Only a yellow hound was actively perplexed.
He could not make out if a hunt were just over or beginning, and ran
eagerly backwards and forwards, leaping alternately upon the captives
and the captors.

The ringleader repeated his challenge. Red Pete gave a reckless laugh
and looked at his wife.

At which Mrs. Red Pete came forward. It seemed that she had much to
say, incoherently, furiously, vindictively, to the ringleader. His
soul would roast in hell for that day's work! He called himself a man,
skunkin' in the open and afraid to show himself except with a crowd
of, other "Kiyi's" around a house of women and children. Heaping
insult upon insult, inveighing against his low blood, his ancestors,
his dubious origin, she at last flung out a wild taunt of his invalid
wife, the insult of a woman to a woman, until his white face grew
rigid, and only that Western-American fetich of the sanctity of
sex kept his twitching fingers from the lock of his rifle. Even her
husband noticed it, and with a half-authoritative "Let up on that,
old gal," and a pat of his freed left hand on her back, took his last
parting. The ringleader, still white under the lash of the woman's
tongue, turned abruptly to the second captive. "And if _you_'ve got
anybody to say 'good-by' to, now's your chance."

The man looked up. Nobody stirred or spoke. He was a stranger there,
being a chance confederate picked up by Red Pete, and known to no one.
Still young, but an outlaw from his abandoned boyhood, of which father
and mother were only a forgotten dream, he loved horses and
stole them, fully accepting the frontier penalty of life for the
interference with that animal on which a man's life so often depended.