The coolest, most damnable murderer in the West was not now going to beg for mercy.

When he had taken up crime as a means of livelihood he had decided that if the price to be paid for his course was death, he would pay like a man.

He glanced at the cottonwood grove, wherein were many ghastly secrets, and smiled.

His hairless eyebrows looked like livid scars and his lips quivered in scorn and anger.
As he sneered at Buck there was a movement in the crowd before him and a pathway opened for Frenchy, who stepped forward slowly and deliberately, as if on his way to some bar for a drink.

There was something different about the man who had searched the Staked Plain with Hopalong and Red: he was not the same puncher who had arrived from Montana three weeks before.