HE STOOD ALONE on the outer edge of the crowd that watched the show, a tall, straight man with just a little slope to his shoulders from riding the long trails.

He wore no gun in sight, but his thumbs were hooked in his belt and Janice had the feeling that the butt of a gun was just behind his hand.  It would always be there.

The light from the coal-oil lamp on the wall touched his face, turning his cheeks into hollows of darkness and his eyes into shadows.  He still wore his hat, shoved back from his face.  He looked what he was, hard, tough... and lonely.

The thought came unbidden.  He would always know loneliness.  The mark of it was on him.

He was a man of violence.  No sort of man she would ever have met at home... and no sort of man for her to know.  Yet from her childhood she had heard of such men.

Watching from behind the edge of the blanket curtain, Janice remembered stories heard when she was a little girl, stories told by half-admiring men of duels and gun battles; but they had never known such a man as this, who walked in a lost world of his own creation.

Yet King Mabry was not unlike her father.  Stern like him, yet with quiet humor sleeping at the corners of his eyes.

Maggie was out front now, holding them as she always held them with her tear-jerking monologues and her songs of lonely men.  Her face was puffy under her too blonde hair, her voice hoarse from whisky and too many years on the boards, but she had them as not even Doc Guilford could get them.  Because at heart all these men were sentimental.

All?

She looked again at King Mabry.  Could a man be sentimental and kill eleven men?

And what sort of man was he?

The thought made her look for Benton, but he was nowhere in sight.  Joe Noss stood near the door talking to Art Boyle.  She thought the name, and then it registered in her consciousness and she looked again.

Yes, it was Barker's teamster.  He stood very close to Noss, his eyes on the stage.  But she knew he was listening to Noss.

The sight made her vaguely uneasy, yet there was nothing unusual in two men talking together in these cramped quarters, where sooner or later everybody must rub elbows with everybody else.

If Mabry was aware of their presence, he gave no indication.  His concern seemed only with the show.

Dodie Saxon came up behind her and Janice drew aside so the younger girl could stand in the opening.

"Which one is King Mabry?" Dodie whispered.

Janice indicated the man standing quietly against the wall.

"He's handsome."

"He's a killer."

Janice spoke more sharply than she had intended.  Dodie was too much interested in men, and this man was the wrong one in whom to be interested.

Dodie shrugged a shapely shoulder.  "So?  This is Wyoming, not Boston.  It's different here."

"It's still killing." Janice turned sharply away.  "You're on next, Dodie."

Dodie opened her coat, revealing her can-can costume.  "I'm ready."

Mabry straightened from the wall as applause followed the end of Maggie's act.  He turned his back on the stage and started toward the door.

"He's leaving," Janice said.  Just why, she could not have explained, but she was secretly pleased.