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not an unduly sensitive person, except where her own feelings were concerned. Neither was she inclined to look ahead to the potential consequences of her acts. This character had called her a whore. She didn’t take that kind of talk from anyone; period; end of story.
    She was gripping her purse in her right hand. Without a word, in one furious unbroken motion, she drew her arm back, swung, and let go. The heavy bag zipped toward him, trailing a tinkling stream of cosmetics, bobby pins, and small change. Instinctively, he threw up his arms to ward it off.
    In the next instant, Lord hit him with a flying tackle. McBride dropped like a rock, but he held onto the gun. He and the deputy went rolling and sprawling among the weeds. They came to their feet, and were as quickly down again, scrambled together in a struggling, tangled mass of flailing feet and slugging fists. It was impossible to intervene, but Joyce moved closer, eyes still blazing with offended dignity, and the two oil-field workers stood poised alertly, ready to leap into the fray at the slightest opportunity.
    Then, the gun began to explode, and the three scampered backward. They were still running, heads ducked, bodies crouched, when there was a final shot, dully muffled this time.
    And then there was silence.
    McBride lay spread-eagled on his back, his outflung right hand still gripping the gun. Lord was slowly rising from his body, staring down at him. Then, jerkily pulling his gaze away, he brushed his mouth with the back of his hand. Dully he watched the approach of Joyce and his two friends.
    Joyce was the first to reach the body. She took a quick glance at it, then spoke, half-defiantly, a small sob in her throat. “He shouldn’t have done that. H-He had no right to call me a whore.”
    “He sure shouldn’t have,” Lord agreed. “He sure didn’t.”
    “We shouldn’t have come here in the first place! I told you we shouldn’t! I begged and pleaded and—and—”
    She began to weep, childlike, hands hanging at her sides, great glossy tears squeezing from her squinted-shut eyes. Lord took her by the shoulders and gently helped her into the car. Forcing a reassuring smile, he dabbed at her tears with a polka-dot bandanna.
    “Better now, honey? Want to honk the old schnozzle?” He held the handkerchief while she blew into it. “What about old Tom gettin’ you a drink of water?”
    “I—I g-guess not. I’ll j-just”—She got a look at herself in the car mirror—“oh, my God! Just look at me! Now, where is my—”
    “You just sit tight. I’ll get it for you.”
    He gathered up the contents of her purse, making sure that nothing was left behind. She grabbed the compact from him and went to work with it almost feverishly. Tom’s mouth twisted as he turned away. She called to him sharply.
    “Now, where do you think you’re going? Let’s get out of here!”
    “We will. Got a little talkin’ to do first.”
    “What’s there to talk about? He’s dead isn’t he?”
    “I reckon. Be pretty hard to live with no brains in his head.”
    She made a disgusted, sickish sound. Curly and Red looked up from the body as he approached them, then moved away at an angle as he nodded his head, joining him as he went up a gentle rise in the land and paused, back turned, at the crest.
    “Didn’t want to look at him no more,” he explained. “Just didn’t feel like I could take it.”
    They murmured sympathetically. Red asked him how it had happened.
    “I don’t rightly know; everything happened so fast. Of course, I was trying to get the gun away from him, but I don’t think I had a hold of it when he got killed. Just seemed like he flung it against his head and pulled the trigger.”
    “It wasn’t your blame, Tom.”
    “Well, it sure wasn’t intentional. But it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t been here.”
    “You got no call to blame yourself,” Curly insisted, “an’ nobody can fault you for it. Any trouble about it, you got us