“If the newspapers tracked me here, I’d have to leave at once.”

“They won’t.  At least, it isn’t likely.”

“You’d get me out some way, wouldn’t you, Ban?” she said trustfully.

“Yes.”

“Ban; that Fred person seemed afraid of you.”

“He’s got nothing to be afraid of unless he talks too much.”

“But you had him ‘bluffed.’  I’m sure you had.  Ban, did you ever kill a man?”

“No.”

“Or shoot one?”

“Not even that.”

“Yet, I believe, from the way he looked at you, that you’ve got a reputation as a ’bad man’?”

“So I have.  But it’s no fault of mine.”

“How did you get it?”

“You’ll laugh if I tell you.  They say I’ve got a ‘killer’s’ eye.”

The girl examined his face with grave consideration.  “You’ve got nice eyes,” was her verdict.  “That deep brown is almost wasted on a man; some girl ought to have it.  I used to hear a—­a person, who made a deep impression on me at the time, insist that there was always a flaw in the character of a person with large, soft brown eyes.”

“Isn’t there a flaw in every character?”

“Human nature being imperfect, there must be.  What is yours; suppressed murderousness?”

“Not at all.  My reputation is unearned, though useful.  Just before I came here, a young chap showed up from nowhere and loafed around Manzanita.  He was a pretty kind of lad, and one night in the Sick Coyote some of the old-timers tried to put something over on him.  When the smoke cleared away, there was one dead and six others shot up, and Little Brownie was out on the desert, riding for the next place, awfully sore over a hole in his new sombrero.  He was a two-gun man from down near the border.  Well, when I arrived in town, I couldn’t understand why every one looked so queerly at my eyes, until Mindle, the mail-driver, told me they were exactly like the hair-trigger boy’s.  Cheap and easy way to get a reputation, isn’t it?”

“But you must have something back of it,” insisted the girl.  “Are you a good shot?”

“Nothing fancy; there are twenty better in town.”

“Yet you pin some faith to your ‘gun,’” she pointed out.

He glanced over his shoulder to right and left.  Io jumped forward with a startled cry.  So swift and secret had been his motion that she hardly saw the weapon before—­PLACK—­PLACK—­PLACK—­the three shots had sounded.  The smoke drifted around him in a little circle, for the first two shots had been over his shoulder and the third as he whirled.  Walking back, he carefully examined the trunks of three trees.

“I’d have only barked that fellow, if he’d been a man,” he observed, shaking his head at the second mark.

“You frightened me,” complained Io.

“I’m sorry.  I thought you wanted to see a little gun-play.  Out here it isn’t how straight you can shoot at a bull’s-eye, but how quick you can plant your bullets, and usually in a mark that isn’t obliging enough to be dead in line.  So I practice occasionally, just in case.”