"Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside, stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two, three—fire!'"
Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze sheepishly.
"Oh, h—l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h—l! I was just trying you out as a tenderfoot—a little joke!"
At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face to face, with the result that all became piously sober.
"Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed, he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.
Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let nothing escape his quiet observation.
When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free of the counter.
"I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did," said Galway.
"I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he murdered them."
"To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way now, one, two, three—fire!"