What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next; while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the only sound in her ears.
"Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.
"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.
She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.
"Why?" she asked. "How?"
"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There is a devil, a big devil, in Señor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy—he is all the time awake; all the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the moment to shoot comes and something in Señor Don't Care—his devil—will make his arm steady."
Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.
"He will win—he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.
Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Señor Don't Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.
And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline.