"Sure, I've got some," replied Mason; "but when I saw you in here, I thought we could have a little friendly talk, and maybe you'd tell me why it was that you shot Rufe in Rawlins. As I say, I never could hear that you had any quarrel."
"Well," said Claib—and his hand with a swiftness that the eye could hardly follow, flew around to his hip; but it never reached the butt of his pistol; for Mason with lightning speed shot forward his left hand and caught Claib by the wrist, while with his right hand he seized the glass of liquor resting on the bar and dashed it into Claib's face. Then he wrapped both arms around him, and called to Ross who had just stepped into the door.
"Take this man's gun and mine and keep them! This isn't going to be a shooting-match."
Ross snatched both pistols from their holsters and stood back.
For a moment the men whirled around over the bare floor in a rapid dance, and then Mason suddenly lifted Claib off the floor, held him for an instant in the air above his head, and then threw him an astonishing distance. The man's head and shoulder coming in contact with the plastered wall burst a large hole in it and loosened some of the weather-boarding on the outside of the building.
Several of the men hastened to Wood and picked him up, expecting to find that his neck was broken. He was senseless and on feeling him they found that his right arm and right collar-bone were broken and the shoulder out of place. None seemed to feel much sympathy for him; he was too well known.
"Now," said Jim Decker, the proprietor of the hotel, "who's going to pay that man's doctor's bills, and who's going to pay for that plaster that you've knocked off, Jack Mason?"
"Why," returned Mason, smiling, "there isn't any doctor in town, so there can't be any doctor's bills; and as for that plaster, if you'll take one of those old newspapers and tack it over the hole, that'll do fine until cold weather comes. When cold weather comes, I'd put a board over it, if I were you."
"Well," snorted Decker, "that's a great note! Coming in and breaking up a man's furniture this way!"
Mason laughed.