nd, 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 i