ink, to run the convention awhile in the interest of
his own crowd. But his greedy fingers never closed over its black-walnut
handle, because, facing him, he saw just then what made him freeze solid
where he was.

Out from behind the Evening Press table and through a scattering huddle
of newspaper reporters, stepping on the balls of his feet as lightly as
a puss-cat, emerged Major Putnam Stone. His sleeves were turned back off
his wrists and his vest flared open. His head was thrust forward so that
the tuft of goatee on his chin stuck straight out ahead of him like a
little burgee in a fair breeze. His face was all a clear, bright,
glowing pink; and in his right hand he held one of the longest cavalry
revolvers that ever was made, I reckon. It had a square-butted ivory
handle, and as I saw that ivory handle I knew what the white thing was
that had flashed by me only a moment before to fell Mink Satterlee so
expeditiously.

Writing this, I've been trying to think of the one word that would best
describe how Major Putnam Stone looked to me as he advanced on Dave
Dancy. I think now that the proper word is competent, for indeed the old
major did look most competent--the tremendous efficiency he radiated
filled him out and made him seem sundry sizes larger than he really was.
A great emergency acts upon different men as chemical processes act upon
different metals. Some it melts like lead, so that their resolution
softens and runs away from them; and some it hardens to tempered steel.
There was the old major now. Always before this he had seemed to me to
be but pot metal and putty, and here, poised, alert, ready--a
wire-drawn, hard-hammered Damascus blade of a man--all changed and
transformed and glorified, he was coming down on Dave Dancy, finger on
trigger, thumb on hammer, eye on target, dominating the whole scene.

Ten feet from him he halted and there was nobody between them. Somehow
everybody else halted too, some even giving back a little. Over the edge
of the stage a ring of staring faces, like a high-water mark, showed
where the onward rushing swell of the Stickney city delegates had
checked itself. Seemingly to all at once came the realization that the
destinies of the fight had by the chances of the fight been entrusted to
these two men--to Dancy and the major--and that between them the issue
would be settled one way or the other.

Still at a half crouch, Dancy's right hand began to steal back under the
skirt