The men were all staring at Hashknife, whose face was drawn, his lips almost white.
‘Cave!’ he snapped. ‘You made a mistake this mornin’. You should have been just as drunk outside of town as yuh was in it.’
Joe Cave flinched, as though some one had seared him with a hot iron.
‘You’ve got mask-marks on yore face, Cave!’ Hashknife’s voice snapped like a whip.
With a jerk of his hand, Cave started to reach for his face, but sagged back against the bar.
‘And you made a mistake, Morgan,’ whispered Hashknife. ‘Why didn’t yuh kill Briggs on flat ground, so yuh could search him, instead of shooting him off the grade into the cañon, where you couldn’t get at him? He had somethin’ in his pocket that you needed bad.’
Joe Cave was the first to act. As he sagged back against the bar, his right hand flashed down to his gun. He was trapped. Morgan’s gun was coming out like a flash, but his bullet ripped into the floor, echoing the crash of Sleepy’s forty-five.
Cave sprang away from the bar, screaming a curse, with Spike Cahill, clinging like grim death to his gun-hand. Lem shot across the space, knocking the table aside, and threw one arm around Cave’s neck, shutting off his wind, while Spike tore away the gun.
Morgan went to his knees, blindly groping for the gun, which had fallen from his nerveless hand, but Hashknife kicked it aside, and Morgan sprawled on his face. They flung Cave into a chair and Lem handcuffed him, while Cave cursed them bitterly.
One of the men ran for the doctor, but Lem turned Morgan over to discover that a doctor was not needed. Hashknife patted Sleepy on the back and leaned against the bar.