Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.
"He will win—he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.
Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Señor Don't Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.
And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline.
Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men, was to give.
"Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant, shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping over glare ice.
"Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish—honestly, we are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I—"
"No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's fight, you—"
"Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.
"Ready!" called Bill Lang.
The ruling passion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw. Again and again he had thus hit his target in practice and six times he had winged his man by such agile promptness.
With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch as of their identity. There was no question in their minds but Pete had played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win. And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the adversary.
Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg, which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked triumphantly toward the gallery gods whose hero he was. They had now risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his trousers seam.
Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest. Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his forehead, while he turned cold.
"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!"
Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.
"And I am going to kill you!"
This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him—a cold, passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues.
Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born—born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face—than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.
"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.
She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.
"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.
"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion.
"Take it out'"
There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed to dominate everything—men, earth, and air.
Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.
It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.
Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.
"Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons.
"Yes," drawled Galway.
"Then