“With your agreement, we shall fix the distance at ten paces, and I shall step it. There is no choice for light, and the wind is at rest. Therefore, there being no person to count for us, I shall ask you to toss a coin again, this time that I may call it: if I fail to do so, you fire first; if I succeed, I fire first. Permit me to advise you, sir, that, if you are unaccustomed to the hair-trigger, it is as well that you be careful lest you lose your shot.”
Eskurola’s manners were apparently never so polished as when he was about to kill or be killed. He measured off the ground and marked the stand for each, always asking Cartaret’s opinion. He stood while Cartaret again tossed a glittering gold-piece in the air.
“Tails!” cried Don Ricardo. “I always prefer,” he explained, “to see this king with his face in the dust. Let us look at him together, so that there will be no mistake.”
The piece lay with its face to the terrace.
“I win,” said Eskurola. “I shoot first. It is bad to begin well.”
Cartaret smiled. With such a marksman as this Basque to shoot at one, the speech became the merest pleasantry. There was only the question of the choice of the pistol, and as to that——
“If you will open the box, I shall choose,” Eskurola was saying. Evidently the choice was also to go to the winner of the toss. Cartaret was certain this would not have been the case if the toss had gone otherwise. “I must touch neither until I have chosen, although the additional powder in the blank pistol tends toward making their weight equal.”
Mechanically Cartaret opened the mahogany box. Don Ricardo scarcely glanced at the pair of beautiful and deadly weapons lying on the purple velvet: he took the one farther from him.
“Pray remember the hair-trigger,” he continued: “you might easily wound yourself. Now, if you please: to our places.”
Each man took off his hat and coat and stood at his post in his white shirt, his feet together, his right side fronting his enemy, his pistol pointing downwards from the hand against his right thigh.