"If you'd been looking I might've been trying to get hold of it yet."
She examined the Colt's gun curiously. She asked him how to handle it. He obligingly broke it, emptied the cylinders and explained how it was fired. But she was not equal to handling the big thing, and told him so.
"Though if I should want to kill you now it would be easy, wouldn't it?" she reflected, after he had reloaded the gun and laid it in her hand, the muzzle pointing toward himself and her finger resting on the trigger.
"Not without cocking the gun."
"No, but I mean suppose I really should want to kill you——"
"I'll show you." He cocked the revolver and placed it again in her hand and it lay once more with her finger on the trigger.
"Now," he explained, "I'm covered."
"And to kill you all I have to do is to pull the trigger."
"Pulling the trigger, the way things are now, would certainly be a big start in that direction. But"—the dry suspicion of a laugh crossed his eyes—"to point a gun at a man and pull the trigger doesn't always kill him—not, anyways, in this country. If it did, the population would fall off pretty strong in some of these northern counties. And you might be surprised if I told you you couldn't pull the trigger right now, anyway."
"How do you know that?"