Buck shot himself in the foot.
Then Ben shot him once in the right elbow, once in the right shoulder. Buck screamed and dropped his gun and threw out his arms, and Ben, who was a thorough man, put a bullet through his right hand, and another one on top of it.
Buck sat in the dust and flapped blood all around, and bawled when we came to get him.
The professor and I told Ben Randolph what had happened, and nobody else. I think he believed us.
Buck spent two weeks in the town jail, and then a year in the state pen for pulling on Randolph, and nobody's seen him now for six years. Don't know what happened to him, or care much. I reckon he's working as a cowhand someplace—anyway, he sends his mother money now and then, so he must have tamed down some and growed up some too.
While he was in the town jail, the professor talked to him a lot—the professor delayed his trip just to do it.
One night he told me, "Tarrant can't do anything like that again. Not at all, even with his left hand. The gunfight destroyed his faith in his ability to do it—or most of it, anyway. And I finished the job, I guess, asking all my questions. I guess you can't think too much about that sort of thing."
The professor went on to San Francisco, where he's doing some interesting experiments. Or trying to. Because he has the memory of what happened that day—but, like Buck Tarrant, not the ability to do anything like that any more. He wrote me a couple times, and it seems that ever since that time he's been absolutely unable to do any telekinesis. He's tried a thousand times and can't even move a feather.
So he figures it was really me alone who saved Ben's life and stopped Buck in his tracks.