It was a great and a bitter moment to him. The sense of physical smallness he had banished a thousand times by the recollection of his speed of hand and his surety with weapons. He had looked at men muscularly great and despised them in the knowledge that a gun or a knife would make him their master. But in Lord Nick he recognized his own nerveless speed of hand, his own hair-trigger balance, his own deadly seriousness and contempt of life. The experience in battle was there, too. And he began to feel that the size of the other crushed him to the floor and made him hopeless. It was unnatural, it was wrong, that this giant in the body should be a giant in adroitness also.
Already Donnegan had died one death before he rose from his chair and stood to the full of his height ready to die again and summoning his nervous force to meet the enemy. He had seen that the big man had followed his own example and had measured him at a glance.
Indeed the history of some lives of action held less than the concentrated silence of these two men during that second's space.
And now Donnegan felt the cold eye of the other eating into his own, striving to beat him down, break his nerve. For an instant panic got hold on Donnegan. He, himself, had broken the nerve of other men by the weight of his unaided eye. Had he not reduced poor Jack Landis to a trembling wreck by five minutes of silence? And had he not seen other brave men become trembling cowards unable to face the light, and all because of that terrible power which lies in the eye of some? He fought away the panic, though perspiration was pouring out upon his forehead and beneath his armpits.
"The colonel is very kind," said Donnegan.
And that moment he sent up a prayer of thankfulness that his voice was smooth as silk, and that he was able to smile into the face of Lord Nick. The brow of the other clouded and then smoothed itself deftly. Perhaps he, too, recognized the clang of steel upon steel and knew the metal of his enemy.
"And therefore," said Lord Nick, "since most of The Corner expects business from us, it seems much as if one of us must kill the other before we part."
"As a matter of fact," said Donnegan, "I have been keeping that in mind." He added, with that deadly smile of his that never reached his eyes: "I never disappoint the public when it's possible to satisfy them."
"No," and Lord Nick nodded, "you seem to have most of the habits of an actor—including an inclination to make up for your part."
Donnegan bit his lip until it bled, and then smiled.