“Don’t have any trouble with him, Johnny!” exclaimed Doris. “Last year two husky fellows got between him and his gun, and he half killed them before he threw them out!”
“I’ll take a chance if he’ll put up the gun,” returned Trumbull.
Wilkins grunted what might have been intended for a laugh of scorn; he did not take the trouble to make answer to that offer. Trumbull smoked and watched the shotgun and wondered just what he was going to do next. He might have been allowed to come again if he had not brought on the crisis to-night. Now he knew that he would have a great deal of difficulty getting into the Wilkins’ home, once he had gone out. How long could he sit here? And what good would it do him if he sat here forever?
III
Trumbull looked across the table at Doris. There was a warmth in her eyes as they met his that communicated itself to his heart; she wanted to save him from harm. He would have given a month’s wages to know how much more than sympathy she felt for him. A lovely, rounded forearm was lying upon the table, with fingers drumming against the cloth. A man would be mad to let a shotgun stand between him and a girl like this!
Trumbull looked at the gun. It pointed toward his stomach, and he experienced an inward shudder at the thought of what would happen if the fingers of Orla Wilkins pressed a little harder against the triggers; or just one of the triggers. Trumbull would not live to know anything about the second barrel.
He began to get extremely angry and stubborn. No half-baked reflection on the human race was going to drive him away from the girl he wanted to marry without a fight! But how could a dead man fight? He was a good deal more than half convinced that the first movement toward battle on his part would fill his ears with the roar of doom.
Trumbull would not go, and he could not do anything else, except stay. The possibilities of just staying grew upon him as a sunrise grows. Suppose he were just to stay put where he was for an hour, twelve hours? Wilkins would not dare to shoot him in cold blood; punishment would be too nearly sure. Trumbull leaned back in his chair, tamped the tobacco down in his pipe, and chuckled.
“Ain’t it about time you was going home?” asked Wilkins.
“I don’t intend to go home. Never! I like it too well where Doris is!”