At the Crystal Palace Hugh had not been conscious of any fear. His brother’s life had depended upon his coolness, the smooth efficiency with which his nerves and muscles coördinated. Not until after the peril was past had he felt any hysteria, and then only because he thought he had killed a man.
The situation was different now. He had to meet alone the most notorious man killer of Nevada, not when he was strung up for action by the clash of a sudden encounter, but after a day and night of suspense in which his imagination would play him unkind tricks and show him ghastly visions. He saw pictures—horrible pictures in which Dutch loomed up a huge apelike superman towering over him as a prostrate victim. He saw himself playing the poltroon, dying, dead, every detail of the scene sharp as the lines of an etching. The little boy in him—the child that had for years been dormant—crept out and wailed with fear. Yet all the time he wore a wooden face that told no tales to curious men who watched him.
When at last he was alone Hugh did the wisest thing possible. He borrowed a page instinctively from twentieth-century psychology not then in vogue. He faced the fact that he was afraid, dragged his fears out into the open, examined them, and jeered at them.
“What’s ailin’ you, Hugh McClintock?” he demanded of himself. “Ain’t you got any sand in yore craw a-tall? Who’s Sam Dutch, anyhow? What if he has got a dozen men? Didn’t he kill half of them when they weren’t lookin’ for trouble? Didn’t he pick on four flushers who wouldn’t stand the gaff? Say he is big as all outdoors. Easier to hit, ain’t he? What do you care if he’s a wild man from Borneo and chews glass, like he claims? All men are the same size when they get behind a Colt gun.”
He oiled his revolver while he fought out his fears aloud. “Whyfor should Sam Dutch hang the Indian sign on you? He’s the same scalawag they had to carry feet first outa the Crystal Palace after you got through with him. He’s the same false alarm Scot ran outa Virginia not so long ago. He should do the frettin’, not you.”
With the thought of Scot, courage flowed back into his heart. He knew that somehow Scot would in his place face this fellow down or blot him from the map. “Trouble with you is you’re scared, Hugh. But you’re goin’ through, ain’t you? Sure. You got to. Then buck up an’ throw the scare into the other fellow.”
His mind stuck to that last thought. What were his brains for if he could not make them more useful than the craft and brutishness of Sam Dutch? His mind began to work out a practical plan of action. When he arose from the bench where he sat cleaning the revolver his eyes were bright and shining. The fear in him, which had for hours been lying like a heavy weight on his subconscious mind, no longer repressed but frankly admitted and examined, had now vanished into thin air.
As soon as it was dark Hugh slipped out of his shack and crept along the side of the gulch toward Main Street. He stopped behind a cabin of whipsawed lumber and edged forward to the back of it. The hut had one room. Except the front door there was no way of entrance but by one of the two windows. Hugh had no intention of entering. He was satisfied that Dutch would not come home till late. Probably he would bring a companion with him as a protection against the chance of being ambushed.
For five minutes Hugh worked at one window, then gave his attention to the other. After this he stole back to the edge of the gulch and busied himself among the branches of a little scrub tree which stood at the point of intersection between a small gorge and the main gulch.
Hugh’s guess had been a good one. It was close to one o’clock in the morning when Dutch returned to his cabin. With him was a companion whom Hugh, lying huddled in the sage close to the cañon’s rising slope, recognized as William Buckley, one of Sam’s boon toadies.