All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehea.r.s.ed impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This incident of the pa.s.s was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged.

Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue.

The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants'

sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her--Ignacio, the note-bearer.

"Senorita! senorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he understood more than he dared to utter. "Senorita, you rise early!"

"Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked.

But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see for himself.

"Senorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy--do you know, senorita?"

"The young man who came down from the pa.s.s with me, you mean?" she asked, inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity.

"Yes, he and Leddy--bad blood between them'" said Ignacio. "You no know, senorita? They fight at daybreak."

The pantomime in the store, Jack's form disappearing with its easy step into the night, a.n.a.lyzed in the light of this news became the natural climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality.

"Come, Ignacio!" she said. "We must hurry!" And she started around the house toward the street.

VII

WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S

While Jack had been playing the pioneer of rural free delivery in Little Rivers, Pete Leddy, in the rear of Bill Lang's store, was refusing all stimulants, but indulging in an unusually large cud of tobacco.

"Liquor ain't no help in drawing a bead," he explained to the loungers who followed him through the door after Jack had gone.

If Pete did not want to drink it was not discreet to press him, considering the mood he was in. The others took liberal doses, which seemed only to heighten the detail of the drama which they had witnessed.

To Mary it had been all pantomime; to them it was dynamic with language.

It was something beyond any previous contemplation of possibility in their cosmos.

The store had been enjoying an average evening. All present were expressing their undaunted faith in the invincibility of James J.

Jeffries, when a smiling stranger appeared in the doorway. He was dressed like a regular cowboy dude. His like might have appeared on the stage, but had never been known to get off a Pullman in Arizona. And the instant he appeared, up flashed Pete Leddy's revolver.

The gang had often discussed when and how Pete would get his seventh victim, and here they were about to be witnesses of the deed. Instinct taught them the proper conduct on such occasions. The tenderfoot was as good as dead; but, being a tenderfoot and naturally a bad shot and p.r.o.ne to excitement, he might draw and fire wild. They ducked with the avidity of woodchucks into their holes--all except Jim Galway, who remained leaning against the counter.

"I gin ye warning!" they heard Pete say, and closed their eyes involuntarily--all except Jim Galway--with their last impression the tenderfoot's ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw.

The thing was incredible and supernatural.

"Pete is letting him come close first," they thought.

But there, unbelievable as it was, Pete was lowering his revolver and the tenderfoot's hand was on his shoulder in a friendly, explanatory position. Pete seemed in a trance, without will-power over his trigger finger, and Pete was the last man in the world that you would expect to lose his nerve. Jim Galway being the one calm observer, whose vision had not been disturbed by precipitancy in taking cover, let us have his version.

"He just walked over to Pete--that's all I can say--walked over to him, simple and calm, like he was going to ask for a match. All I could think of and see was his smile right into that muzzle and the glint in his eyes, which were looking into Pete's. Someway you couldn't shoot into that smile and that glint, which was sort of saying, 'Go ahead! I'm leaving it to you and I don't care!'--just as if a flash of powder was all the same to him as a flash of lightning."

The desert had given Jack life; and it would seem as if what the desert had given, it might take away. He was not going to humble himself by throwing up his arms or standing still for execution. He was on his way into the store and he continued on his way. If something stopped him, then he would not have to take the train East in the morning.

"Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside, stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two, three--fire!'"

Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze sheepishly.

"Oh, h--l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h--l! I was just trying you out as a tenderfoot--a little joke!"

At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face to face, with the result that all became piously sober.

"Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed, he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.

Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained impa.s.sive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let nothing escape his quiet observation.

When Jack looked around and understood what had pa.s.sed, his face was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free of the counter.

"I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did,"

said Galway.

"I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he murdered them."

"To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way now, one, two, three--fire!"

Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot, turned to Jack:

"It's not worth your being a target for a dead shot," he said.

"In the morning, yes," answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way that swept the audience with uncanniness. "But to-night I am engaged.

Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East."

"Well, are you going to let me go?" Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in appeal to the loungers, who were his men.

"Yes, by all means," Jack told Galway. "And as I shall want a man with me, may I rely on you? Four of us will be enough, with a fifth to give the word."

"Ropey Smith can go with me," said Leddy.

It scarcely occurred to them to give the name of duel to this meeting, which Jack held was the only fair way when one felt that he must have satisfaction from an adversary in the form of death. An _arroyo_ a mile from town was chosen and the time dawn, for a meeting which was to reverse the ethics of that boasted fair-play in which the man who first gets a bead is the hero.

"It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his arms with second-cla.s.s matter.

Jim Galway resumed his position, leaning against the counter watchfully as the gang filed out to the rear to wet up, and in his right hand, which was in his pocket, nestled an automatic pistol.

"I'd shot Pete Leddy dead--'twas the first real fair chance within the law--so help me, G.o.d! I would," he thought, "if there had been time to spare, and save that queer tenderfoot's life. And me a second in a regular duel! Well, I'll be--but it ain't no regular duel. One of 'em is going to drop--that is, the tenderfoot is. I don't just know how to line him up. He beats me!"