CHAPTER XVII
The sun had gone down that night upon a town thirsting for action. Two Moons was like a fever patient in whose veins has accumulated all the virus of fantasy and disordered imaginings and who approaches that zero hour of the ultimate combustion of every atom of the contagion. Its imagination had been fired by the early-morning appearance of the Killer between a girl of startling beauty and an outlaw head of a modern Robin Hood band. This imagination easily was transformed to the kinetic call for action when Woolly Annie came to town with her plaint of a new outrage done, when Uncle Alf conjured the voices of ancient prophets to urge a liberation from the bondsmen. The trick of psychology which Original Bill had turned to his advantage wherewith to rescue a hated representative of the cattle barony from summary vengeance was the final provocation of explosion.
