“If you’re a gentleman you’ll hand me those reins.”
“Aw, cut it out! You gi’me a pain! Come on”—he dropped the reins to the ground—“you ’n’ me’s gota have a couple o’ beers and get acquainted.”
Shaking like a leaf, Manzanita took a step toward the reins, trying to avoid him and at the same time get hold of them.
He waited disarmingly until she stooped for them, then suddenly took her by the shoulders.
With a little scream she straightened, but she held the reins. Indignantly she shook her shoulders, her tremor outmatched by her anger now. But he tried to take her in his arms, grinning maliciously.
Then with all her might she shot a little brown fist to his jaw, and it cracked musically. It was not a slap—it was a punch, deliberate and not ineffective. In the instant that he was staggering back, surprised beyond measure, she grasped the saddle horn, and, without throwing the reins over the mare’s neck and ignoring the stirrup, vaulted like an acrobat to a sitting posture in the saddle. When Blacky Silk stepped quickly toward her, his dark eyes alight with anger and determination, he stopped suddenly and looked into the black muzzle of her Colt.
“Perhaps you feel like taking one of your pills now,” she said, her voice cool and steady as the whistle of a valley quail.
Blacky Silk seemed to feel better at once, though his face did not show it. A laugh of derision came from the door of Johnny’s place.
“Go on, Blacky!” they called jeeringly. “Ain’t losin’ interest, are you? What’s the matter all of a sudden?”
The muzzle of the gun was steady. The girl held it on a line with her thigh, pointing straight at his breast—not at his head, proving that she was no amateur. Blacky seemed suddenly to have remembered that when he took .38’s for pills it had occurred in the day before high-power powder had been invented.