"I'll pay you for your rifle right now," mumbled Hawk, feeling with his right hand in his trousers pocket for some gold pieces.
"Don't talk monkey stuff, Abe."
"Then don't make a monkey out of me," snapped Hawk. "Give me your rifle and let me go!"
"After we've talked it over."
Hawk pulled himself up out of the chair. "You blamed fool," he said brokenly. "Don't you know that bunch will track me to your door and smash us with lead or burn us up in this shack if they get here first? Give me the rifle," he thundered, "or I'll go into the timber with this six-shooter. What do you mean? Are you going to turn yellow on me because I'm a thief?"
Laramie moved neither hand nor foot: "You're an older man than I am, Abe," he replied, without even looking up. "I can take words from you, I'd hate to take from anybody else—you know that; and you know why. You won't talk; all right. Now I'll tell you where you get off; you're not going down to the timber—not a blamed step," he added deliberately. "Finger your six-shooter as much as you like." Laramie waved his hand with his words. "Use it on me if you like. But, by ——, Abe——" As his voice changed, he jumped to his feet, adding like lightning, "you're not going to use it on yourself!"
He sprang for Hawk, reaching with his left hand for the gun. In tigerish ferocity the two men came together. Sleepy Cat worthies had sometimes speculated on what might happen if the two men most known and most feared in the Falling Wall country, Hawk and Laramie, should ever quarrel. They met now; but in a quarrel the wildest gossip had not fancied. Reeling, feet slipping, knees and hands locking, eyes staring, no word spoken and breathing hard, the two struggled in the middle of the cooped-up room—Hawk striving to free and kill himself; Laramie determined to wrest the gun from his grasp.
It was an unequal contest. Weakened by loss of blood, Hawk was not long a match for the only man on the range who under other conditions could have stood up before him. Gradually, with the gun in his right hand, Hawk was bent backward, with Laramie's left hand slipping along the barrel closer and closer to the grip. Prolonged by the fear of further injuring the wounded man, the tempestuous effort for mastery ended when Hawk was forced to the bed and Laramie's iron fingers, closing on the gun, wrenched it from him.
Hawk was done out and Laramie without more resistance straightened him out on the bed.
"You're worse hit than you think," panted the conqueror. "I've got a scheme better than yours, if there's time to put it through. Wait till I get a couple of horses."