He sighted his weapon much as you throw a stone—by judging with his eye. He filed off the sight, so it wouldn't catch in the holster And he didn't use the trigger at all. That, too, could be taken off. Let us say that he was using both guns. He drew them from their holsters with marvelous speed. As he did so, he flipped back the hammers with his thumbs, and allowed them to fall on the cartridges, thus firing the first shots. The remaining shots were fired by working the hammers in the same way, and the actions caused an up-and-down movement of the guns. Seems a funny way to fire a revolver, doesn't it? But it wasn't funny for the man who was in front of the bad man.
He had another way of not leveling the gun at all, but firing from his hip, the revolver being held there, and the hammer worked with the thumb. Another and very expert way was to fire from the holster, not taking the gun out at all. This was remarkably quick and deadly.
But the strangest way of all, that was sometimes used at close quarters, was called "fanning." The gun was held at the hip, the first shot fired with the thumb-hammer movement. The gunman spread out the thumb and fingers of his other hand, and quickly drawing them across the hammer, one after another, they fired the shots with lightning rapidity. You would be surprised at the speed with which shots can be fired in this way. Try it sometime—with an empty gun.
Whitey, waiting behind the living-room door, had heard in bunk-house talk of these various ways in which the bad man proved himself an artist with his gun—had to prove himself one, if he wanted to remain alive. But when Mart Cooley, the most deadly man of that kind in the West, entered the living-room and faced the ranchmen, Whitey did not get his thrill—at first. For Mart was not a very large, nor a very fierce-looking person, as he stood sidewise to Whitey, and talked to the others.
Not often does crime fail to leave its mark on a man. The mouth, the chin, the forehead; some feature usually shows traces of it. And when Mart Cooley turned and Whitey saw his eyes, he got his thrill. They were a hard, light, steely gray, and they looked out from lowered lids, oh, so steadily. Months of brooding in the prison had helped to harden Mart's eyes, that had needed no help in that way; brooding over imaginary wrongs, for he thought his arrest an injustice. Other men had stolen a few cows, and got away with them, but Mart was made to suffer, and came to think himself a victim.
Out in the barren waste of the Chinook Country, lonely and gloomy, Mart had planned vengeance. But against whom? No one man could fight the Government. Failure was sure to come, and it meant death or worse—further imprisonment. In time Mart had come to regard all humanity as his enemy. Thus does crime and solitude twist the mind of man. Mart was ripe for a killing. And these men were offering him a chance.