“If you so much as make a motion for that gun in your pants,” he said in an undertone, “my friend Dave Wells will kill you before you get it out.”
Now Rock had made that step with the deliberate intention of slapping Walters’ face. No Texan would take a blow and not retaliate. He couldn’t live with himself if he did. But, “my friend, Dave Wells,” made him hesitate. Rock’s glance marked Wells, twenty feet away, a silent watchful figure. And it was more than a mere personal matter. Down in Fort Worth, Uncle Bill Sayre had joint responsibility with this man for the safeguarding of a fortune, and a medley of queer conclusions were leaping into Rock’s agile brain. Reason, logic, evidence—all are excellent tools. Sometimes instinct or intuition, something more subtle than conscious intellectual processes, short-circuits and illuminates the truth with a mysterious flash of light. This man before him was afraid of Doc Martin. He was afraid of Doc, over and above any desire for possession of a woman—any passion of jealousy. There was too much at stake, he had said. Rock would have given much to know just what Buck Walters meant by the phrase. Doc Martin would have known. Rock didn’t regret the surge of his own temper—the insult and challenge he had flung in this man’s teeth. But he fell back on craft.
“Yes,” he said. “I’d expect you to take no chance on an even break, with anybody or about anything. You’ll play safe. You’ll pass the word that I’m to be put away. You tried it already.”
“Next time there will be no slip-up,” Walters answered with cold determination. “You have said things you shouldn’t have said. You have shot off your mouth at me. You have made a play at a fool of a girl that I aim to have for myself. I have a cinch, Martin, and I am goin’ to play it for all it is worth.”
“A cinch on me—or on the Maltese Cross?” Rock taunted.
“Both,” Walters muttered, in a whisper like a hiss, the first emotion that had crept into his cold, malevolent voice.
“That’s a damaging admission to make,” Rock sneered.
“Not to you,” Walters said flatly. “You’ll never have a chance to use it. You are goin’ to be snuffed out, if you don’t pull out. I don’t like you, for one thing; you are interferin’ with my plans, for another.”
“Those are pretty strong words, Buck,” Rock told him soberly. “I’m not an easy man to get away with.” He tried a new tack. “If you are so dead anxious to get rid of me, why don’t you try making it worth my while to remove myself?”