He stood, watching, his wide gaze including them all, until, one after another the men in the group silently moved away. They did not go far. Some of them merely stepped into near-by doorways, others sauntered slowly down the street and halted at a little distance to look back.
But no man made a hostile move, for they had seen the tragedy in which Laskar had figured, and they had no desire to provoke Harlan to express again the cold wrath that slumbered in his eyes.
Meeder Lawson was the first of Deveny’s intimates to leave the group. His face sullen, his eyes venomous, he walked across the street to the First Chance, and stood in the doorway, beside Balleau, who had been an interested onlooker.
Then Strom Rogers moved. He wheeled slowly, flashing an inquiring glance at Deveny—who still stood motionless. Deveny had lowered his hands—they were hanging at his sides, the right hand having the palm toward Harlan, giving eloquent testimony of its owner’s peaceable intentions.
Rogers’ glance included the out-turned palm, and his lips curved in a faint smile. The smile held as his glance went to Harlan’s face, and for an instant as the eyes of the two men met, appraisal was the emotion that ruled in them. Harlan detected in Rogers’ eyes a grim scorn of Deveny, and a malignant satisfaction; Rogers saw in Harlan’s eyes a thing that not one of the men who had faced the man had seen—cold humor.
Then Rogers was walking away, leaving Deveny to face the man who had disrupted his plans.
Deveny had not changed his position, and for an instant following the departure of Rogers, there was no word spoken. Then for the first time since he had dismounted from Purgatory, Harlan’s eyes lost their wide, inclusive vacuity. They met Deveny’s fairly, with a steady, direct, boring intensity; a light in them that resembled the yellow flame that Deveny had once seen in the eyes of a Mexican jaguar some year before at a camp on the Neuces.
Deveny knew what the light in Harlan’s eyes meant. It meant the presence of a wild, rending passion, of elemental impulses; it meant that the man who faced him was eager to kill him, was awaiting his slightest hostile movement. It meant more. The gleam in Harlan’s eyes indicated that the man possessed that strange and almost uncanny instinct of thought reading, that he could detect in another’s eyes a mental impulse before the other’s muscles could answer it. Also, it meant certain death to Deveny should he obey the half-formed determination to draw and shoot, that was in his mind at this instant.
He dropped his lids, attempting to veil the thought from Harlan. But when he again looked up it was to see Harlan’s lips twisting into a cold smile—to see Harlan slowly sheathing the gun he had held in his right hand.
And now Harlan was standing before him, both weapons in their holsters. He and Deveny were facing each other upon a basis of equality. Harlan had disdained taking advantage.