Mexicali Joe, with one last frightened look over his shoulder, fled; they heard his running feet outside. He was jabbering unintelligibly as he fled: "Señor Caballero! ... Dios! ... those devils!..."
Joe was gone. Bruce Standing's work was done. He looked grim and implacable, a man of iron heated in the red-hot furnace of rage. He yearned for Taggart to make a move; or for Gallup. Shipton, as a lesser cur, he ignored.
They saw how white, as white as a clean sheet of paper, his face was; they did not fully understand why, since a man's face, when he is in a terrible rage, may whiten, as an effect of the searing emotion; they did not know how he had driven his wounded body all day long nor how sore his wound was. They could not guess that even now he was holding himself upright and towering among them through the fierce bending of his indomitable will. That same will he bent terribly for clean-cut articulation.
"Taggart!" he said, and his voice rang as clear as the striking of an iron hammer upon a resounding anvil. "I'll tempt you to be a man such as you once were, before you went yellow clean through ... and I'll show you, your self, how dirty a yellow you've gone! Pick up Young Gallup's rifle!"
Taggart glared at him and muttered and hesitated, tugged one way by hatred and the madness of wrath, tugged the other way by his fear of the certainty of death. Lights, bluish lights, flickered in Timber-Wolf's eyes. He said again:
"Pick up that rifle! Otherwise, in less than ten seconds you are a dead man!"
Taggart's face was red when Standing began to speak; ashen by the last word. Nervously and in great haste he stooped and caught up the gun.
"You've got your chance, Jim Taggart! Your last chance! To fight it out, or say, for these men to hear: 'I'm a dirty yellow dog!' If you're game we'll fight it out. I'll give you an even break; and we'll kill each other!"
Taggart held the rifle, not lifted quite to his waist; his hands were rigid upon it and did not tremble. He was not a coward; on many an occasion, when he had borne his sheriff's badge recklessly through violence, he had shown himself a brave man. He knew now that it lay within his power, if he were quick and sure, to kill Bruce Standing, whom he had come to hate, so that his hatred was like a running sore. And he knew, too, that killing, he would be killed. If it were any man on earth whom he confronted save Bruce Standing....
So he hesitated, for brave man as Jim Taggart always was, he was a man who did not want to die. And Standing laughed at him and said: