To be infused, even by bunkum and banter, with the idea of killing, is a sad overthrow of sane balance. I would not have conceived the thing possible to me a month back. But the monotonous desert trail, the close companying with virile, open minds, and the 227 strict insistence upon individual rights—yes, and the irritation of the same faces, the same figures, the same fare, the same labor, the same scant recreations, all worked as poison, to depress and fret and stimulate like alternant chills and fever.
Practice I did, if only in friendly emulation of the others, as a pass-the-time. I improved a little in drawing easily and firing snap-shot. The art was good to know, bad to depend upon. In the beginnings it worried me as a sleight-of-hand, until I saw that it was the established code and that Daniel himself looked to no other.
In fact, he pricked me on, not so much by word as by manner, which was worse. Since that evening when, in the approving parlance of my friends, I had “cut him out” by walking with her to the Adams fire, we had exchanged scarcely a word; he ruffled about at his end of the train and mainly in his own precincts, and I held myself in leash at mine, with self-consciousness most annoying to me.
But his manner, his manner—by swagger and covert sneer and ostentatious triumph of alleged possession emanating an unwearied challenge to my manhood. My revolver practice, I might mark, moved him to shrugs and flings; when he hulked by me he did so with a stare and a boastful grin, but without other response to my attempted “Howdy?”; now and again he assiduously cleaned his gun, sitting out where I should see even if I did not straightway look; in this 228 he was most faithful, with sundry flourishes babying me by thinking to intimidate.
Withal he gave me never excuse of ending him or placating him, but shifted upon me the burden of choosing time and spot.
Once, indeed, we near had it. That was on an early morning. He was driving in a yoke of oxen that had strayed, and he stopped short in passing where I was busied with gathering our mules.
“Say, Mister, I want a word with yu,” he demanded.
“Well, out with it,” I bade; and my heart began to thump. Possibly I paled, I know that I blinked, the sun being in my eyes.
He laughed, and spat over his shoulder, from the saddle.
“Needn’t be skeered. I ain’t goin’ to hurt ye. I ’laow yu expected to make up to that woman, didn’t yu, ’fore this?”