“Sure.  And I’m going to punish all of it I can get my hands on!” He turned toward the door.  “And when I’m good and full of it,” he added as an afterthought, “I’m liable to come over here and lick you, Lew, just for being such an agreeable cuss.  You better leave your mother’s address handy.”  He laughed a little to himself as he pulled the door shut behind him.  “I bet he’ll keep the frost thawed off the window to-day, just to see who comes up the platform,” he chuckled.

He would have been more amused if he had seen how the agent ducked anxiously forward to peer through the ticket window whenever the door of the waiting room opened, and how he started whenever the snow outside creaked under the tread of a heavy step; and he would have been convulsed with mirth if he had caught sight of the formidable billet of wood which Lew kept beside his chair all that day, and had guessed its purpose, and that it was a mute witness to the reputation which one Ford Campbell bore among his fellows.  Lew was too wise to consider for a moment the revolver meant to protect the contents of the safe.  Even the unintelligent know better than to throw a lighted match into a keg of gunpowder.

Ford leaned backward against the push of the storm and was swept up to the hotel.  He could not remember when he had felt so completely baffled; the incident of the girl and the ceremony was growing to something very like a calamity, and the mystery which surrounded it began to fret him intolerably; and the very unusualness of a trouble he could not settle with his fists whipped his temper to the point of explosion.  He caught himself wavering, nevertheless, before the wind-swept porch of the hotel “office.”  That, too, was strange.  Ford was not wont to hesitate before entering a saloon; more often he hesitated about leaving.

“What’s the matter with me, anyway?” he questioned himself impatiently.  “I’m acting like I hadn’t a right to go in and take a drink when I feel like it!  If just a slight touch of matrimony acts like that with a man, what can the real thing be like?  I always heard it made a fool of a fellow.”  To prove to himself that he was still untrammeled and at liberty to follow his own desire, he stamped across the porch, threw open the door, and entered with a certain defiance of manner.

Behind the bar, Sam was laughing with his mouth wide open so that his gum showed shamelessly.  Bill and Aleck and Big Jim were leaning heavily upon the bar, laughing also.

“I’ll bet she’s a Heart-and-Hander, tryin’ a new scheme to git a man.  Think uh nabbing a man when he’s drunk.  That’s a new one,” Sam brought his lips close enough together to declare, and chewed vigorously upon the idea,—­until he glanced up and saw Ford standing by the door.  He turned abruptly, caught up a towel, and began polishing the bar with the frenzy of industry which never imposes upon one in the slightest degree.

Bill glanced behind him and nudged Aleck into caution, and in the silence which followed, the popping of a piece of slate-veined coal in the stove sounded like a volley of small-caliber pistol shots.