and should pronounce for
tragedy, at least for true melodrama.

Besides, I was expected to uphold the honor of our Gentile mess along with
my own honor. That was demanded; ever offered in cajolery to encourage my
pistol practice. I was, in short, "elected," by an obsession equal to a
conviction; and what with her insistently obtruded as a bonus I never was
permitted to lose sight of the ghastly prize of skill added to merit.

At first the matter had disturbed and horrified me mightily, to the extent
that I anticipated evading the issue while preparing against it. Surely
this was the current of a prankish dream. And dreams I had--frightfully
tumultuous dreams, of red anger and redder blood, sometimes my own blood,
sometimes another's; dreams from which I awakened drenched in cold
nightmare sweat.

To be infused, even by bunkum and banter, with the idea of killing, is a
sad overthrow of sane balance. I would not have conceived the thing
possible to me a month back. But the monotonous desert trail, the close
companying with virile, open minds, and the strict insistence upon
individual rights--yes, and the irritation of the same faces, the same
figures, the same fare, the same labor, the same scant recreations, all
worked as poison, to depress and fret and stimulate like alternant chills
and fever.

Practice I did, if only in friendly emulation of the others, as a
pass-the-time. I improved a little in drawing easily and firing snap-shot.
The art was good to know, bad to depend upon. In the beginnings it worried
me as a sleight-of-hand, until I saw that it was the established code and
that Daniel himself looked to no other.

In fact, he pricked me on, not so much by word as by manner, which was
worse. Since that evening when, in the approving parlance of my friends, I
had "cut him out" by walking with her to the Adams fire, we had exchanged
scarcely a word; he ruffled about at his end of the train and mainly in
his own precincts, and I held myself in leash at mine, with
self-consciousness most annoying to me.

But his manner, his manner--by swagger and covert sneer and ostentatious
triumph of alleged possession emanating an unwearied challenge to my
manhood. My revolver practice, I might mark, moved him to shrugs and
flings; when he hulked by me he did so with a stare and a boastful grin,
but without other response to my attempted "Howdy?"; now and again he
assiduously cleaned his gun, sitting out where I should see e