Rawlins walked around the place in a dumb, cold daze. His hat was lost, his clothing was dusty and disheveled as if he had striven for his life hand to hand. It did not come into his thoughts to inquire whether he had passed through the fight unwounded; it was enough in his dumb state that he was not conscious of any pain.
It seemed to him that a profound silence had settled over his lonely homestead; that the three men riding like thieves in all haste down the creek had snatched something away from him, neither the nature nor value of which he was fully conscious of, leaving him altogether unlike what he had been only a little while before.
How long before? How long had that battle lasted? Not a great while, scarcely more than a few minutes, he calculated, looking up for his measurement of time to the spreading morning. It was daylight when they woke him in their efforts to pull his house down; the sun was only making a far-off candle-flare on the horizon now. It would be almost an hour yet until sunrise. And he had killed a man.
It gave him a shocking start to think of it that way: the sun an hour away yet, and he had killed a man. What connection there was in the peculiarly divided
