“A-huh! Thet so?” Knell's words cut the air, stilled the room. “You're from way down the river. Thet's what they say down there—'on the dodge.'... Stranger, you're a liar!”
With swift clink of spur and thump of boot the crowd split, leaving Knell and the stranger in the center.
Wild breed of that ilk never made a mistake in judging a man's nerve. Knell had cut out with the trenchant call, and stood ready. The stranger suddenly lost his every semblance to the rough and easy character before manifest in him. He became bronze. That situation seemed familiar to him. His eyes held a singular piercing light that danced like a compass-needle.
“Sure I lied,” he said; “so I ain't takin' offense at the way you called me. I'm lookin' to make friends, not enemies. You don't strike me as one of them four-flushes, achin' to kill somebody. But if you are—go ahead an' open the ball.... You see, I never throw a gun on them fellers till they go fer theirs.”
Knell coolly eyed his antagonist, his strange face not changing in the least. Yet somehow it was evident in his look that here was metal which rang differently from what he had expected. Invited to start a fight or withdraw, as he chose, Knell proved himself big in the manner characteristic of only the genuine gunman.
“Stranger, I pass,” he said, and, turning to the bar, he ordered liquor.
The tension relaxed, the silence broke, the men filled up the gap; the incident seemed closed. Jim Fletcher attached himself to the stranger, and now both respect and friendliness tempered his asperity.
“Wal, fer want of a better handle I'll call you Dodge,” he said.
“Dodge's as good as any.... Gents, line up again—an' if you can't be friendly, be careful!”
Such was Buck Duane's debut in the little outlaw hamlet of Ord.