Steptoe scrambled to his knees, revolver in hand, but the other figure never moved. “Hands up!” said Jack, sighting his own weapon. The reports seemed simultaneous, but Jack's bullet had pierced Steptoe's brain even before the outlaw's pistol exploded harmlessly in the air.
The two men dismounted, but by a common instinct they both ran to the prostrate figure that had never moved.
“By God! it's a boy!” said Jack, leaning over the body and lifting the shoulders from which the head hung loosely. “Neck broken and dead as his pal.” Suddenly he started, and, to Demorest's astonishment, began hurriedly pulling off the glove from the boy's limp right hand.
“What are you doing?” demanded Demorest in creeping horror.
“Look!” said Jack, as he laid bare the small white hand. The first two fingers were merely unsightly stumps that had been hidden in the padded glove.
“Good God! Van Loo's brother!” said Demorest, recoiling.
“No!” said Jack, with a grim face, “it's what I have long suspected,--it's Steptoe's son!”
“Yes,” said Jack; and he added, after looking at the two bodies with a long-drawn whistle of concern, “and I wouldn't, if I were you, say anything of this to Barker.”
“Well,” returned Jack, “when our scrimmage was over down there, and they brought the news to Barker that his wife and her diamonds were burnt up at the hotel, you remember that they said that Mrs. Horncastle had saved his boy.”
“Yes,” said Demorest; “but what has that to do with it?”
“Nothing, I reckon,” said Jack, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, “only Mrs. Horncastle was the mother of the boy that's lying there.”
Two years later as Demorest and Stacy sat before the fire in the old cabin on Marshall's claim--now legally their own--they looked from the door beyond the great bulk of Black Spur to the pallid snow-line of the Sierras, still as remote and unchanged to them as when they had gazed upon it from Heavy Tree Hill. And, for the matter of that, they themselves seemed to have been left so unchanged that even now, as in the old days, it was Barker's voice as he greeted them from the darkening trail that alone broke their reverie.
“Well,” said Demorest cheerfully, “your usual luck, Barker boy!” for they already saw in his face the happy light they had once seen there on an eventful night seven years ago.