"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!"
Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.
"And I am going to kill you!"
This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him—a cold, passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues.
Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born—born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face—than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.
"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.
She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.
"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.
"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion.
"Take it out'"