The two who were with him, evidently with interests in common, were scarcely friendly with the cowman, if such he was; it was evident in their attitude, the constraint which had fallen upon them following that mention of “Rook.”
But the man in the black Stetson continued to study the big fellow through the holes in his newspaper: the hard face, tanned a rich saddle color; the nose, flattened to a smudge of flaring nostril; the cauliflower ear.
He had heard the name, “Ellison” once or twice; somewhere, deep down, it had set vibrating a chord of memory that brought with it, incongruously enough, an altogether different setting: a padded ring under twin, blazing arcs; the thud and shuffle of sliding feet; a man, huge, brutish, broad, fists like stone mauls, yet, for all his bulk, a very cat for quickness....
He put down his paper now—to find those hard eyes boring into his. Ellison, or whatever the man’s name was, had shifted in his seat; the glance that he turned now upon the stranger in the black Stetson was searching, probing. There was a truculence in it, a fierce, bright, avid staring, like an animal’s, savage in its very directness, like a challenge—which in effect it was.
Annister returned the look, eye for eye, with a bitter, brooding insolence in which there was apparent a certain mockery, his eyes in a veiled gleaming, like the sun on water. For a long moment their glances engaged, in a silent duel, like rapier points; then the giant with the cauliflower ear vented a sound between a grunt and a snort, turning to the window, his gaze outward across the flat levels of the adjacent prairie in a kind of sightless stare.
There had been no reason in it—no logic—that Annister could see, but for the moment he had owned to a sudden sense of crisis; it had seemed to him for a moment that in the giant’s eyes there had been almost a knowing, an understanding look. But the man could have no business with him—of that he was certain.
The fellow was just a bully, probably, a big, hulking lump of beef who resented, as it might chance, Annister’s undeniably cosmopolitan air; the sardonic flicker in the gray-green eyes; the cool, contemptuous appraisal. But, after all, it had been the giant who had begun it.
And yet, somehow, Annister was thinking that he had seen him before, and, oddly, illogically enough, he found himself liking the man—why, he could not have told.
Black Steve Annister, “with the heart of a cougar and the conscience of a wolf,” as a disgruntled enemy had at one time phrased it, could have sat into that game had he been so minded, with profit to himself, pecuniary and otherwise, but he had preferred to play the hand that had been dealt him. Later, at Dry Bone, that would be another matter.
Now, his lean, strong, hawklike face darkened abruptly with the thought behind his eyes, and then—for Annister had eyes in the back of his head—he was suddenly aware that the conductor was advancing along the aisle.