here were only two
of them besides the Kid whom he had ever seen before, one the bartender,
one a man with whom he had had no dealings; noted that neither Charley
nor Ed Bedloe were in the house. He saw too that the bartender had
leaned a little over his bar, saying something swiftly to the man whom
he was serving; that the man turned curiously to look toward the door;
while at the same time the man across the table from the Kid had given
warning, and the Kid's hands had come away from his cards, dropping down
into his lap.

Then Thornton came on, walking slowly, passing about the first poker
table, then by the faro table, the roulette wheel, and finally to the
table where the Kid sat. Bedloe had not moved again: he had not turned,
his cards lay unheeded before him. The other men were silent with a jack
pot waiting for their attention.

"When he turns," Thornton was telling himself, "it's going to be in the
direction of his gun, and he's going to come up shooting."

There were many men there who sensed the thing he did. Not a man in the
saloon whose eyes were not keen and expectant as they ran back and forth
between the two, Thornton who had shot Bedloe before now, Bedloe who had
sworn to "get him." A chair leg scraped and many men started as if it
had been the first pistol shot; it was only the man across the table
from Bedloe moving back a little, ready to leap to his feet to right or
left. Somebody laughed. At the sound though Bedloe's big thick body
remained steady like a rock his fingers twitched perceptibly.

"Bedloe," and Thornton's voice was cool and low toned, with no tremor in
it, no fear, no threat, no hint of any kind of expression, "I want a
talk with you."

He was not five short paces behind the brawler's back. The Kid turned a
little in his chair, slowly, very slowly like a machine. His eyes came
to rest full upon Thornton's. And Thornton, looking back steadily into
the hard eyes, steely and blue and fearless, low lidded and watchful,
knew that the man had fully expected to see straight into the barrel of
a revolver. For a moment it was as though this place had come under such
a spell as that in the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, with every man
touched by a swift enchantment that had stilled his blood and turned his
body to stone.

Thornton saw that Bedloe's hands were tense with tendons standing out
sharply under the brown skin, the fingers rigid, curved inward a little,
and not three inches from th