“I am a-huntin’ for a ——­ furriner ’at I promised to run out of town before to-morrow mornin’.  Is he in here!” He tried to stand still, but finding this difficult, advanced.

A pause fell in the conversation around the stove.  Two or three of the men, after a civil enough greeting, hitched themselves into a more comfortable posture in their chairs, and it was singular, though Keith did not recall it until afterwards, that each of them showed by the movement a pistol on his right hip.

After a general greeting, which in form was nearer akin to an eternal malediction than to anything else, Mr. Bluffy walked to the bar.  Resting himself against it, he turned, and sweeping his eye over the assemblage, ordered every man in the room to walk up and take a drink with him, under penalties veiled in too terrific language to be wholly intelligible.  The violence of his invitation was apparently not quite necessary, as every man in the room pulled back his chair promptly and moved toward the bar, leaving Keith alone by the stove.  Mr. Bluffy had ordered drinks, when his casual glance fell on Keith standing quietly inside the circle of chairs on the other side of the stove.  He pushed his way unsteadily through the men clustered at the bar.

“Why in the ——­ don’t you come up and do what I tell you?  Are you deaf?”

“No,” said Keith, quietly; “but I’ll get you to excuse me.”

“Excuse ——!  You aren’t too good to drink with me, are you?  If you think you are, I’ll show you pretty ——­d quick you ain’t.”

Keith flushed.

“Drink with him,” said two or three men in an undertone.  “Or take a cigar,” said one, in a friendly aside.

“Thank you, I won’t drink,” said Keith, yet more gravely, his face paling a little, “and I don’t care for a cigar.”

“Come on, Mr. Keith,” called some one.

The name caught the young bully, and he faced Keith more directly.

“Keith?—­Keith!” he repeated, fastening his eyes on him with a cold glitter in them.  “So you’re Mr. Keith, are you?”

“That is my name,” said Keith, feeling his blood tingling.

“Well, you’re the man I’m a-lookin’ for.  No, you won’t drink with me, ’cause I won’t let you, you ——­ ——­ ——!  You are the ——­ ——­ that comes here insultin’ a lady?”

“No; I am not,” said Keith, keeping his eyes on him.

“You’re a liar!” said Mr. Bluffy, adding his usual expletives.  “And you’re the man I’ve come back here a-huntin’ for.  I promised to drive you out of town to-night if I had to go to hell a-doin’ it.”

His white-handled pistol was out of his waistband with a movement so quick that he had it cocked and Keith was looking down the barrel before he took in what had been done.  Quickness was Mr. Bluffy’s strongest card, and he had played it often.

Keith’s face paled slightly.  He looked steadily over the pistol, not three feet from him, at the drunken creature beyond it.  His nerves grew tense, and every muscle in his frame tightened.  He saw the beginning of the grooves in the barrel of the pistol and the gray cones of the bullets at the side in the cylinder; he saw the cruel, black, drunken eyes of the young desperado.  It was all in a flash.  He had not a chance for his life.  Yes, he had.