"B' G——!" said Bill, speaking as from a throat filled with dust, "I'll go after 'em in a minute."
"Don't you an inch!" cried the stranger, sternly. "Don't you budge!"
"Well," said Bill, glaring at the bushes—"well—"
"Put your head down!" suddenly screamed the stranger, in white alarm. As the guns roared, Bill uttered a loud , and for a moment leaned panting on his elbow, while his arm shook like a . Then he upreared like a great and spirit of , his face lighted with the blaze of his last passion. The Mexicans came swiftly and in silence.
The lightning action of the next few moments was of the of dreams to the stranger. The muscular struggle may not be real to the drowning man. His mind may be on the far, straight shadows back of the stars, and the terror of them. And so the fight, and his part in it, had to the stranger only the quality of a picture half . The rush of feet, the spatter of shots, the cries, the faces seen like masks on the smoke, resembled a happening of the night.
And yet certain lines, forms, lived out so strongly from the incoherence that they were always in his memory.
He killed a man, and the thought went swiftly by him, like the feather on the , that it was easy to kill a man.
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