“Think of it,” gasped Lefever, “to be beaten by an eighteen-year-old girl.”
“Now that,” declared Jeffries, waking up as if for the first time interested, “is exactly where you made your mistake, John. Henry is young and excitable–––”
“Excitable!” echoed Lefever, taken aback.
“Yes, excitable––when a girl is in the ring––why not? Especially a trim, all-alive, up-and-coming, 7 blue-eyed hussy like that girl of Duke Morgan’s. She would upset any young fellow, John.”
“A girl from Morgan’s Gap?”
“Morgan’s Gap, nothing!” responded Jeffries scornfully. “What’s that got to do with it? Does that change the fire in the girl’s eye, the curve of her neck, the slope of her shoulder, John, or the color of her cheek?” Lefever only stared. “De Spain got to thinking about the girl,” persisted Jeffries, “her eyes and neck and pink cheeks rattled him. Against a girl you should have put up an old, one-eyed scout like yourself, or me, or Bob Scott.
“There’s another thing you forget, John,” continued Jeffries, signing even more rapidly. “A gunman shoots his best when there’s somebody shooting at him––otherwise he wouldn’t be a gunman––he would be just an ordinary, every-day marksman, with a Schuetzenverein medal and a rooster feather in his hat. That’s why you shoot well, John––because you’re a gunman, and not a marksman.”
“That boy can shoot all around me, Jeff.”
“For instance,” continued Jeffries, tossing off signatures now with a rubber stamp, and developing his incontestable theory at the same time, “if you had put Gale Morgan up against Henry 8 at, say five hundred yards, and told them to shoot at each other, instead of against each other, you’d have got bull’s-eyes to burn from de Spain. And the Calabasas crowd wouldn’t have your money. John, if you want to win money, you must study the psychological.”
There was abundance of raillery in Lefever’s retort: “That’s why you are rich, Jeff?”