ugh can mosey along, takin'
care not to try any monkey business!"

He stood, watching, his wide gaze including them all, until, one after
another the men in the group silently moved away. They did not go far.
Some of them merely stepped into near-by doorways, others sauntered
slowly down the street and halted at a little distance to look back.

But no man made a hostile move, for they had seen the tragedy in which
Laskar had figured, and they had no desire to provoke Harlan to express
again the cold wrath that slumbered in his eyes.

Meeder Lawson was the first of Deveny's intimates to leave the group. His
face sullen, his eyes venomous, he walked across the street to the First
Chance, and stood in the doorway, beside Balleau, who had been an
interested onlooker.

Then Strom Rogers moved. He wheeled slowly, flashing an inquiring glance
at Deveny--who still stood motionless. Deveny had lowered his hands--they
were hanging at his sides, the right hand having the palm toward Harlan,
giving eloquent testimony of its owner's peaceable intentions.

Rogers' glance included the out-turned palm, and his lips curved in a
faint smile. The smile held as his glance went to Harlan's face, and for
an instant as the eyes of the two men met, appraisal was the emotion that
ruled in them. Harlan detected in Rogers' eyes a grim scorn of Deveny,
and a malignant satisfaction; Rogers saw in Harlan's eyes a thing that
not one of the men who had faced the man had seen--cold humor.

Then Rogers was walking away, leaving Deveny to face the man who had
disrupted his plans.

Deveny had not changed his position, and for an instant following the
departure of Rogers, there was no word spoken. Then for the first time
since he had dismounted from Purgatory, Harlan's eyes lost their wide,
inclusive vacuity. They met Deveny's fairly, with a steady, direct,
boring intensity; a light in them that resembled the yellow flame that
Deveny had once seen in the eyes of a Mexican jaguar some year before at
a camp on the Neuces.

Deveny knew what the light in Harlan's eyes meant. It meant the presence
of a wild, rending passion, of elemental impulses; it meant that the man
who faced him was eager to kill him, was awaiting his slightest hostile
movement. It meant more. The gleam in Harlan's eyes indicated that the
man possessed that strange and almost uncanny instinct of thought
reading, that he could detect in another's eyes a mental impulse before
the oth