"Who was that?" I demanded indignantly. "Who is that man, and what the devil did he mean by blowing down the back of my neck?"
He stared at me, with fluttering lids, chalk-faced—I was to appreciate presently what terror rode that obscure soul.
"Não compriendo," he stammered, though I had heard him use good-enough English of a sort in wheedling for tips. Impatient at his stupidity and my own jumpy nerves, I flung away from him—or, rather, I started to fling and was halted there in my tracks....
Now the contact of a revolver is something that no man need be taught to identify. It is a part of instinctive knowledge. When a hard blunt nose snuggled suddenly under my lowest rib I required no verbal order to make me stand quite passive and obedient. So I did stand, while still mechanically resisting the furtive, tremulous fingers that came stealing round my wrist, trying to force my hand open.
I was not half so frightened as amazed, and certainly not half so frightened as the creature himself. I knew it must be the wretched little attendant who was tickling me with that revolver, and that he was trying to hold me up for something—what it might be I scarcely thought. If he had been respectable in any way through strength or skill or personality, I believe I might have yielded. But to be robbed by this miserable hireling, this pop-eyed dispenser of bad cocktails, himself in a state of the most abject funk, roused all the stubbornness of which I was capable. As if a sheep had assaulted me!
I suppose I should have allowed myself to be shot ingloriously had not the big gambler discovered what was going on. In two steps he was by me, pouched the weapon with a fist like a muff, and simply abolished Pop-eye....
"Easy now!" he warned him. "Don't yell!" It was an absurd anticlimax to see that bold, bad gunman being jammed upright to keep him from falling in a heap. "Reposo yourself, matey, if you know what's good. Be quiet—comprendo so much? Nobody's going to hurt you."
Somehow I found myself back at the little table. The gambler occupied the chair at my right this time, whence he could watch my late enemy, who hung collapsed over the bar. Except for these trifling changes, the whole incident might have seemed illusion.
"What was that for?" I managed to ask.
The gambler answered with a negligence that struck me in my condition of mind like an affront: