“Sam,” I said.
“How far off was it?”
“Oh, about thirty yards.”
“Can he do it again?”
“Of course,” I said; “every time. He could do it twice that far.”
Laud’s second turned to his principal.
“Laird,” he said, “you don’t want to fight that man. It’s just like suicide. You’d better settle this thing, now.”
So there was a settlement. Laird took back all he had said; Mark said he really had nothing against Laird—the discussion had been purely journalistic and did not need to be settled in blood. He said that both he and Laird were probably the victims of their friends. I remember one of the things Laird said when his second told him he had better not fight.
“Fight! H—l, no! I am not going to be murdered by that d—d desperado.”
Sam had sent another challenge to a man named Cutler, who had been somehow mixed up with the muss and had written Sam an insulting letter; but Cutler was out of town at the time, and before he got back we had received word from Jerry Driscoll, foreman of the Grand jury, that the law just passed, making a duel a penitentiary offense for both principal and second, was to be strictly enforced, and unless we got out of town in a limited number of hours we would be the first examples to test the new law.