And he raised his gun to draw the bead.
“Wait!” called the same voice which had
checked the spring of the dog. Surely it could
not have come from the lips of Barry. It held
a resonance of chiming metal; it was not loud, but
it carried like a brazen bell. “Don’t
do it, Strann!”
And it came to every man in the barroom that it was
unhealthy to stand between the two men at that instant;
a sudden path opened from Barry to Strann.
“Bart!” came the command again. “Heel!”
The dog obeyed with a slinking swiftness; Jerry Strann
put up his gun and smiled.
“I don’t take a start on no man,”
he announced quite pleasantly. “I don’t
need to. But—you yaller hearted houn’—get
out from between. When I make my draw I’m
goin’ to kill that damn wolf.”
Now, the fighting face of Jerry Strann was well known
in the Three B’s, and it was something for men
to remember until they died in a peaceful bed.
Yet there was not a glance, from the bystanders, for
Strann. They stood back against the wall, flattening
themselves, and they stared, fascinated, at the slender
stranger. Not that his face had grown ugly by
a sudden metamorphosis. It was more beautiful
than ever, for the man was smiling. It was his
eyes which held them. Behind the brown a light
was growing, a yellow and unearthly glimmer which
one felt might be seen on the darkest night.
There was none of the coward in Jerry Strann.
He looked full into that yellow, glimmering, changing
light—he looked steadily—and
a strange feeling swept over him. No, it was
not fear. Long experience had taught him that
there was not another man in the Three B’s, with
the exception of his own terrible brother, who could
get a gun out of the leather faster than he, but now
it seemed to Jerry Strann that he was facing something
more than mortal speed and human strength and surety.
He could not tell in what the feeling was based.
But it was a giant, dim foreboding holding dominion
over other men’s lives, and it sent a train
of chilly-weakness through his blood.
“It’s a habit of mine,” said Jerry
Strann, “to kill mad dogs when I see ’em.”
And he smiled again.
They stood for another long instant, facing each other.
It was plain that every muscle in Strann’s body
was growing tense; the very smile was frozen on his
lips. When he moved, at last, it was a convulsive
jerk of his arm, and it was said, afterward, that
his gun was all clear of the leather before the calm
stranger stirred. No eye followed what happened.
Can the eye follow such speed as the cracking lash
of a whip?
There was only one report. The forefinger of
Strann did not touch his trigger, but the gun slipped
down and dangled loosely from his hand. He made
a pace forward with his smile grown to an idiotic thing
and a patch of red sprang out in the centre of his
breast. Then he lurched headlong to the floor.
