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Brunner, but the connection seemed to escape him for the moment.
    “Oh, don't think I don't know what's been goin' on in these hills!” he shouted. “Don't think I haven't seen your evil comings and goings. Oh, I'm aware of your sins, Ike Brunner, but the day of Armageddon has arrived!”
    And at that Ike Brunner turned slowly on one knee, drew his pistol, and shot Mort Stringer in the chest. Once, twice, the big Colt's bellowed in the clearing, and the preacher fluttered for a moment like some disjointed puppet and then fell to the ground as soundlessly as an October leaf. It happened so fast that Dunc was momentarily stunned. Ike's iciness, the offhand manner in which the man could commit murder, left Dunc unable to utter a sound.
    He had never seen anything like this before. Oh, in the heat of rage or passion he had seen plenty of violence, and even killing, but he had not known that one man was capable of killing another as casually as brushing away a troublesome fly.
    Cal Brunner, on the instant of the first explosion, came up on one elbow, groaning. “The old bastard!” he cried bitterly. “He deserved it!”
    Ike blew thoughtfully into his smoking pistol and said nothing. The girl stared wide-eyed in panic at the crumpled body of her father.
    “Get me out of here,” Cal grated. “I've had enough of this. I've had enough of her!”
    Ike did not once look at the dead man. Now he studied the girl coldly. Cal saw the calculating look in his brother's slitted eyes and said uneasily, “Ike, what are you thinkin'?”
    “None of your business.”
    “Listen to me, Ike. You were right. I should have let her alone. But damn it, she seemed willin' enough. Everything would have been all right if the old man hadn't-”
    “Shut up,” Ike said harshly, still studying the girl. Cal swallowed hard. Now his own panic was almost as obvious as the girl's.
    “Ike, for the love of God!”
    The girl leaped up like a startled deer. Ike grinned quietly as she fled toward the sheltering trees.
    Up on the rise, Dunc relaxed the hard grip on his shotgun and breathed a long sigh of relief. Ike will have to let her go, he thought. Not even he would shoot a girl down in cold blood.
    And then, even before the thought had become full grown, Ike Brunner fired once from the hip, and again from a studied aim, and the girl tripped, as though she had stumbled over a stone, and fell face down in a spongy bed of pine needles.
    Cal Brunner hid his face in his hands. Then he lay back and covered his eyes with his forearm, as though shutting out the sight would shut out reality.
    “Ike, you didn't have to kill her!” he said hoarsely.
    “That's where you're wrong,” his brother said mildly, and he began to reload. “I told you to stay away from her, but you wouldn't listen.”
    “But you didn't have to kill her!”
    Ike came erect, suddenly angry. “Stop your whinin'!”
    Dunc thought he was going to be sick. He lay face down in the weeds, hugging the shotgun hard in his arms. For one wild instant he had Ike Brunner dead in his sights, his finger hard on the trigger, and then he thought hopelessly, What's the use? Killing him won't bring Mort and the girl back. It will only put my folks in bad with the gang.
    Now Ike was speaking again, calmly. “There was no other way to handle it. You let the old fool catch you foolin' with the girl. He'd have set out to put the whole hill country against us if I'd let him go.”
    “But the girl! Did you have to kill her too?”
    “What do you think she would have done if I hadn't?” Ike asked coldly. “She would have had the word all over the hills that I'd killed the preacher. How do you think that would have been? How many boys do you think would answer the call if they knew I was a preacher killer?”
    Cal groaned, more concerned with his own hurt than with what Ike was saying. But Ike went on patiently, as though he were drilling a backward child in a ridiculously simple lesson. “Listen to me,