f, who had broken down into his rage again, and struggled madly
while words ran from him.

"Let me go! ---- you, let me free. I want to fight the coward that
struck my wife. You've killed her. Who was it? Let me get at him."

Shorty stiffened as though a douche of ice-water had struck him.
"Killed her! Struck his wife!" My God! Not that sweet creature of
his dreams who had talked and smiled at him without noting his
deformity--

An awful anger rose in him and he moved out into the light.

"Han'sup!"

Whatever of weakness may have dragged at his legs, none sounded in
the great bellowing command that flooded the room. At the compelling
volume of the sound every man whirled and eight empty hands shot
skyward. Their startled eyes beheld a man's squat body weaving
uncertainly on the limbs of an insect, while in each hand shone a
blue-black Colt that waved and circled in maddening, erratic orbits.

At the command, Marsh Tremper's mind had leaped to the fact that
behind him was one man; one against five, and he took a gambler's
chance.

As he whirled, he drew and fired. None but the dwarf of Bar X could
have lived, for he was the deadliest hip shot in the territory. His
bullet crashed into the wall, a hand's breadth over Shorty's
"cow-lick." It was a clean heart shot; the practised whirl and flip
of the finished gun fighter; but the roar of his explosion was echoed
by another, and the elder Tremper spun unsteadily against the table
with a broken shoulder.

"Too high," moaned the big voice. "--The liquor."

He swayed drunkenly, but at the slightest shift of his quarry, the
aimless wanderings of a black muzzle stopped on the spot and the body
behind the guns was congested with deadly menace.

"Face the wall," he cried. "Quick! Keep 'em up higher!" They
sullenly obeyed; their wounded leader reaching with his uninjured
member.

To the complacent Shorty, it seemed that things were working nicely,
though he was disturbingly conscious of his alcoholic lack of
balance, and tortured by the fear that he might suddenly lose the
iron grip of his faculties.

Then, for the second time that night, from the stairs came the voice
that threw him into the dreadful confusion of his modesty.

"O Ross!" it cried, "I've brought your gun," and there on the steps,
dishevelled, pallid and quivering, was the bride, and grasped in one
trembling hand was her husband's weapon.

"Ah--h!" sighed Shorty, seraphically, as th