The building had been designed as a bowling-alley and was built the entire length of the lot. With an alacrity born of experience, the long space opposite the bar was cleared, and the belligerents stationed one at either end, their faces toward the wall. Midway between them a heavy line had been drawn with chalk, and beside it stood a half-dozen grim men, their hands resting suggestively on their hips. The room was again very quiet, and from out-of-doors penetrated the shrill sound of a schoolboy whistling “Annie Laurie” with original variations. So exotic seemed the entire scene in its prairie setting, that it might have been transferred bodily from the stage of a distant theatre and set down here,––by mistake.
“Now,” directed a voice. “You understand, men. You’re to face and walk to the line. When your feet touch––fire; and,” warningly––“remember, 194 not before. Ready, gentlemen. Turn.”
Ichabod faced about, the cocked revolver in his hand, the name Asa Arnold singing in his ears. A terrible cold-white anger was in his heart against the man opposite, who had publicly caused the resurrection of this hated, buried thing. For a moment it blotted out all other sensations; then, rushing, crowding came other thoughts,––vision from boyhood down. In the space of seconds, faded scenes of the dead past took on sudden color and as suddenly vanished. Faces, he had forgotten for years, flashed instantaneously into view. Voices long hushed in oblivion, re-embodied, spoke in accents as familiar as his own. Inwardly he was seething with the myriad shifting pictures of a drowning man. Outwardly he walked those half-score steps to the line, unflinchingly; came to certain death,––and waited: personification of all that is cool and deliberate––of the sudden abundant nerve in emergencies which comes only to the highly evolved.
Duggin, the big man, turned likewise at the word and came part way swiftly; then stopped, 195 his face very pale. Another step he took, with another pause, and with great drops of perspiration gathering on his face, and on the backs of his hands. Yet another start, and he came very near; so near that he gazed into the blue of Ichabod’s eyes. They seemed to him now devil’s eyes, and he halted, looking at them, fingering the weapon in his hand, his courage oozing at every pore.
Out of those eyes and that long, thin face stared death; not hot, sudden death, but nihility, cool, deliberate, that waited for one! The big beads on his forehead gathered in drops and ran down his cheeks. He tried to move on, but his legs only trembled beneath him. The hopeless, unreasoning terror of the frightened animal, the raw recruit, the superstitious negro, was upon him. The last fragment of self-respect, of bravado even, was in tatters. No object on earth, no fear of hereafter, could have made him face death in that way, with those eyes looking into his.
The weapon shook from Duggin’s hand to the floor,––with a sound like the first clatter of gravel on a coffin lid; and in abasement absolute 196 he dropped his head; his hands nerveless, his jaw trembling.
“I beg your pardon––and your wife’s,” he faltered.
“It was all a lie? You were drunk?” Ichabod crossed the line, standing over him.
A rustle and a great snort of contempt went around the room; but Duggin still felt those terrible eyes upon him.
“I was very drunk. It was all a lie.”