"I don't know what your fight with him is, but he's abused you; he's got you hogtied now. That you've a fight of some sort with him is enough for me.... Aren't two heads better than one?"—insinuatingly.
The miner forced himself to meet that inquiring gaze steadily, but his expression of delight, of triumph, which came into his face was not forced, was not counterfeit, and he growled quickly:
"I don't need any man's help in my fight ... when I got an even chance. My troubles are my own an' I'll tend to 'em, but, if you want to do me a favor, you'll cut these damn straps ... you'll give me a chance to fight, man to man!"
He did not lie with those words; his inference might have been deception but that chance to fight man to man was the dearest privilege he could have been offered.
No primitive urge to punish with his own hands a man who had crossed him made itself paramount with Lytton; he wanted Bayard to suffer, but the means did not matter. If he could cause him injury and avoid the consequence of personal accountability, so much the better, and it was with a grunt of relief and triumph that he shoved the automatic into the waist band of his pants, drew a knife from his pocket and grasped the tightly knotted straps.
"You bet, I'll help anybody against that dirty—
"Sit still!" he broke off, as Benny, quivering with excitement, strained forward. "I'm likely to cut you if—"
The blade slashed through the leather. Lynch floundered to his feet, free, alone in the room with the man he had deliberately planned to kill, and the overwhelming sense of impending achievement swept all caution from him.
He stumbled a step or two forward after the suddenly parting of the straps set him free and then turned about to face Lytton, who stood beside the chair closing his knife. Behind the Easterner was the cupboard on which Bayard had placed Benny's gun, and the miner's first idea should have been to restrain himself, to keep on playing a strategic game, to move carefully, deliberately until he was armed and could safely show his hand.
But such control was an impossibility. He faced Ned Lytton who stood there with an evil smile on his lips, and all the love for his dead father, all the outraged sense of property rights, all the brooding, the waiting, the accumulated tension caused something in him to swell until he felt a choking sensation, until the hate came into his face, until he drew his clenched fists upward and shook his head and bellowed and charged, madly, blindly, wanting only to have his hands on his enemy, to take his life as the first men took the lives of those who had done them wrong! The feel of perishing flesh in his palms ... that was what he wanted!