"In which case he would in all probability draw and quarter you and take your scalp for a memento. On second thought, I don't know but you're safer where you are."
The mere suggestion was perspiratory, and the traveling man mopped his face. But there are occasions when one must talk or burst, and presently he began again.
"Say, I suppose they'll lynch that fellow if they catch him, won't they?"
The badgered one came to attention with a fine-lined frown of annoyance radiating fan-like above his eyes. He was of the stuff of which man-masters are made; a well-knit figure of a man, rather under than over the average of height and breadth, but so fairly proportioned as to give the impression of unmeasured strength in reserve,—the strength of steel under silk. His face was bronzed with the sun-stain of the altitudes, but it was as smooth as a child's, and beardless, with thin lips and masterful eyes of the sort that can look unmoved upon things unnamable.
"Lynch him? Oh, no; you do us an injustice," he said, and the tone was quite as level as the eye-volley. "We don't lynch people out here for shooting,—only for talking too much."
Whereat one may picture unacclimated loquacity gasping and silenced, with the owner of the "Chincapin" and other listed properties going on to read his letters and telegrams in peace. The process furthered itself in the sequence of well-ordered dispatch until a message, damp from the copying-press and dated at Leadville, came to the surface. It covered two of the yellow sheets in the spacious handwriting of the receiving operator, and Denby read it twice, and yet once again, before laying it aside. Whatever it was, it was not suffered to interrupt the orderly sequence of things; and Denby had read the last of the letters before he held up a summoning finger for a bell-boy.
"Go and ask the clerk the name of the man who was shot, will you?"
The information came in two words, and the querist gathered up his papers and sent the boy for his room key. At the stairhead he met the surgeon and stopped him to ask about the wounded man.
"How are you, Doctor? What is the verdict? Is there a fighting chance for him?"
"Oh, yes; much more than that. It isn't as bad as it might have been; the skull isn't fractured. But it was enough to knock him out under the circumstances. He had skipped two or three meals, he tells me, and was under a pretty tense strain of excitement."