Six Feet Four | Page 8

women
folk as circumstantial a description of the whole affair as though she
herself had witnessed it.
After a while a man here and there began to eat, taking a slab of bread
and meat in one hand and a cup of black coffee in the other, walking
back and forth and talking thickly. The girl at the fireplace sat stiff and
still, staring at the flames; she had lost her appetite, had quite forgotten
it in fact. At first from under the hand shading her eyes she watched the
men going for one drink after another, the strong drink of the frontier;
but after a little, as though this had been a novel sight in the beginning
but soon lost interest for her, she let her look droop to the fire. Fresh
dry fuel had been piled on the back log and at last a grateful sense of
warmth and sleepiness pervaded her being. She no longer felt hunger;
she was too tired, her eyelids had grown too heavy for her to harbour
the thought of food. She settled forward in her chair and nodded. The
talk of the men, though as they ate and drank their voices were lifted,
grew fainter and fainter in her ears, further and further away. Finally
they were blended in an indistinguishable murmur that meant nothing....
In a doze she caught herself wondering if the wounded man in the next
room would live. It was terribly still in there.
She was in that mental and physical condition when, the body tired and
the brain betwixt dozing and waking, thought becomes a feverish
process, the mind snatching vivid pictures from the day's experience
and weaving them into as illogical a pattern as that of the crazy quilt
over her shoulders. All day long she had ridden in the swaying,
lurching, jerking stage until now in her chair, as she slipped a little
forward, she experienced the sensations of the day. Many a time that

day as the racing horses obeying the experienced hand of the driver
swept around a sharp turn in the road she had looked down a sheer cliff
that had made her flesh quiver so that it had been hard not to draw back
and cry out. She had seen the horses leaping forward scamper like mad
runaways down a long slope, dashing through the spray of a rising
creek to take the uphill climb on the run. And tonight she had seen a
masked man shoot down one of her day's companions and loot the
United States mail.... And in a register somewhere she had written
down the name of Hill's Corners. The place men called Dead Man's
Alley. She had never heard the name until today. Tomorrow she would
ask the exact significance of it....
At last she was sound asleep. She had found comfort by twisting
sideways in her chair and resting her shoulder against the warm
rock-masonry of the outer edge of the fireplace. She awoke with a start.
What had recalled her to consciousness she did not know. Perhaps a
new voice in her ears, perhaps Poke Drury's tones become suddenly
shrill. Or it may be that just a sudden sinking and falling away into
utter silence of all voices, the growing still of hands upon dice cups, all
eloquent of a new breathless atmosphere in the room had succeeded in
impressing upon her sleep-drugged brain the fact of still another vital,
electrically charged moment. She turned in her chair. Then she settled
back, wondering.
The door was open; the wind was sweeping in; again old newspapers
went flying wildly as though in panicky fear. The men in the room
were staring even as she stared, in bewilderment. She heard old man
Adams's tongue clicking in his toothless old mouth. She saw Hap Smith,
his expression one of pure amazement, standing, half crouching as
though to spring, his hands like claws at his sides. And all of this
because of the man who stood in the open doorway, looking in.
The man who had shot Bert Stone, who had looted a mail bag, had
returned! That was her instant thought. And clearly enough it was the
thought shared by all of Poke Drury's guests. To be sure he carried no
visible gun and his face was unhidden. But there was the hugeness of
him, bulking big in the doorway, the spare, sinewy height made the

taller by his tall boot heels, the wide black hat with the drooping brim
from which rain drops trickled in a quick flashing chain, the shaggy
black chaps of a cowboy in holiday attire, the soft grey shirt, the grey
neck handkerchief about a brown throat, even the end of a faded
bandana trailing from a hip pocket.
He stood stone-still a moment,