"You want to be moving along" mimicked the devil in Jerry Strann. "Well, you wait a while. I ain't through with you yet. Maybe—" he paused and searched his mind. "You've given me a fall, and maybe you can give the rest of us—a laugh!"
The chuckle of appreciation went up the bar and down it again.
"I want to ask you," went on the devil in Jerry Strann, "where you got your hoss?"
"He was running wild," came the gentle answer. "So I took a walk, one day, and brought him in."
A pause.
"Maybe," grinned the big man, "you creased him?"
For it is one of the most difficult things in the world to capture a wild horse, and some hunters, in their desperation at seeing the wonderful animals escape, have tried to "crease" them. That is, they strive to shoot so that the bullet will barely graze the top of the animal's vertebrae, just behind the ears, stunning the horse and making it helpless for the capture. But necessarily such shots are made from a distance, and little short of a miracle is needed to make the bullet strike true—for a fraction of an inch too low means death. So another laugh of appreciation ran around the barroom at the mention of creasing.
"No," answered Barry, "I went out with a halter and after a while Satan got used to me and followed me home."
They waited only long enough to draw deep breath; then came a long yell of delight. But the obscure devil was growing stronger and stronger in Strann. He beat on the bar until he got silence. Then he leaned over to meet the eyes of Barry.
"That," he remarked through his teeth, "is a damned—lie!"