roof. The man nearest Rawlins let out a yell when he discovered him, pulling up short, cutting loose with his rifle, a one-handed shot. Rawlins felt the breath of the bullet in his face.
After that, things mounted to a turmoil in which Rawlins felt himself a shaving driven before a flame. He had a confused sense of dodging from sage-clump to sage-clump, doubling, firing; oppressed by a suffocating desperation, a wild hopelessness. He did not know whether he was wounded or whole, for his body seemed a thing apart, a sort of dumb ally who handled the hot rifle, above whom his frantic mind fluttered like a mother bird which screams at sight of a serpent at her nest.
It ended with Rawlins standing in the open not far from the corner of his house. How he got there, moved by what intention, he did not know. A horse was down by the wire fence around the stacks. The man who had ridden it had taken the riderless horse and gone off with the other two—there they were, galloping off down the creek, bending low, trying to make themselves small in the sight of this most unreasonable person that ever took up a homestead in the Dry Wood country.
The one who had gone running with the match was lying there, his hat a little way ahead of him, stretched out as if he had reached with his last strength to stop the closing door of life. His right arm was extended, the wasted match-end lying close by his finger-tips.
