s what the gunman didn't do.

He sighted his weapon much as you throw a stone--by judging with his
eye. He filed off the sight, so it wouldn't catch in the holster And he
didn't use the trigger at all. That, too, could be taken off. Let us say
that he was using both guns. He drew them from their holsters with
marvelous speed. As he did so, he flipped back the hammers with his
thumbs, and allowed them to fall on the cartridges, thus firing the
first shots. The remaining shots were fired by working the hammers in
the same way, and the actions caused an up-and-down movement of the
guns. Seems a funny way to fire a revolver, doesn't it? But it wasn't
funny for the man who was in front of the bad man.

He had another way of not leveling the gun at all, but firing from his
hip, the revolver being held there, and the hammer worked with the
thumb. Another and very expert way was to fire from the holster, not
taking the gun out at all. This was remarkably quick and deadly.

But the strangest way of all, that was sometimes used at close quarters,
was called "fanning." The gun was held at the hip, the first shot fired
with the thumb-hammer movement. The gunman spread out the thumb and
fingers of his other hand, and quickly drawing them across the hammer,
one after another, they fired the shots with lightning rapidity. You
would be surprised at the speed with which shots can be fired in this
way. Try it sometime--with an empty gun.

Whitey, waiting behind the living-room door, had heard in bunk-house
talk of these various ways in which the bad man proved himself an
artist with his gun--had to prove himself one, if he wanted to remain
alive. But when Mart Cooley, the most deadly man of that kind in the
West, entered the living-room and faced the ranchmen, Whitey did not get
his thrill--at first. For Mart was not a very large, nor a very
fierce-looking person, as he stood sidewise to Whitey, and talked to the
others.

Not often does crime fail to leave its mark on a man. The mouth, the
chin, the forehead; some feature usually shows traces of it. And when
Mart Cooley turned and Whitey saw his eyes, he got his thrill. They were
a hard, light, steely gray, and they looked out from lowered lids, oh,
so steadily. Months of brooding in the prison had helped to harden
Mart's eyes, that had needed no help in that way; brooding over
imaginary wrongs, for he thought his arrest an injustice. Other men had
stolen a few cows, and got away wi