Then a splash of blood stained his sun-coloured moustache; his empty pistol rattled on the board floor; his head dropped on his arm, and Rice Hoskins was dead.
It was at this crisis that Riley Bent, startled by the artillery as he sat in the Red Light, came whirling to the scene on his pony. The duel was over before he set foot in stirrup. He saw at a glance that Rice Hoskins was only a memory. Had he been romantic, or a sentimentalist, Riley Bent would have shot out the hour with Jack Moore, the Marshal. And had there been one spark of life in the heart of Rice Hoskins to have fought over, Riley Bent would have stood in the smoke of his own six-shooter all day and taken what Fate might send. As it was, however, he curbed his broncho in mid-speed so bluntly, the Spanish bit filled its mouth with blood. It spun on its hind hoofs like a top. Then, as the long spurs dug to its ribs, it whizzed off in the opposite direction; out of camp like an arrow. The last bullet in Jack Moore's pistol splashed on a silver dollar in Riley Bent's pocket as he turned his pony.
“Whenever I reloads my pistol,” said Jack Moore to Old Man Enright, who had come up, “I likes to reload her all around; so I don't regyard that last cartridge as no loss.”
Wagon Mound Sal was deep in a study of Rice Hoskins' “Injun letter” when the shooting took place. The missive's meaning was not so easy to make out as its hopeful authors had believed. When the deeds of Jack Moore were related to her, however, the brow of Wagon Mound Sal took on an angry flush. She sent a message to Jack Moore asking him to call at once.
“Whatever do you mean?” she demanded of Jack Moore, as he entered the laundry, “a-stampedin' of Riley Bent out of camp that a-way? Don't you know I was intendin' to marry him? Yere he's been gone a month, an' yet the minute he shows up you have to take to cuttin' the dust 'round his moccasins with your six-shooter, an' away he goes ag'in. He jest nacherally seizes on your gun-play for a good excuse. It's shore enough to drive one plumb loco!”
Jack Moore looked decidedly bothered.
“Of course, Sal,” he said at last in a deprecatory way, “you-all onderstands that when I takes to shakin' the loads outen my six-shooter at Riley Bent, I does it offishul. An' I'm free to say, that I was that wropped and preoccupied like with my dooties as Marshal at the time, I never thinks once of them nuptials you med'tates with Riley Bent. If I had I would have downed his pony with that last shot an' turned him over to you. But perhaps it ain't too late.”
It was the next afternoon. Riley Bent was reclining in his camp in the Très Hermanas. Grey, keen eyes watched him from behind a point of rocks. Suddenly a mouthful of white smoke puffed from the point of rocks, and something hard and positive broke Riley Bent's leg just above the knee. The blow of the bullet shocked him for a moment, but the next, with a curse in his mouth, and a six-shooter in each hand, he tumbled in behind a boulder to do battle with his assailant. With the crack of the Winchester which accompanied the phenomena of smoke-puff and broken leg, came the voice of Jack Moore, Marshal.