But
she lay still and held her tongue. Then he dragged her to her feet.

"Hurry now--grab that pack--an' follow me." Again Riggs laid hold of the
two saddles. A desperate gleam, baleful and vainglorious, flashed over
his face. He was living his one great adventure.

The girl's eyes dilated. They looked beyond him. Her lips opened.

"Scream again an' I'll kill you!" he cried, hoarsely and swiftly. The
very opening of her lips had terrified Riggs.

"Reckon one scream was enough," spoke a voice, slow, but without the
drawl, easy and cool, yet incalculable in some terrible sense.

Riggs wheeled with inarticulate cry. Wilson stood a few paces off, with
his gun half leveled, low down. His face seemed as usual, only his eyes
held a quivering, light intensity, like boiling molten silver.

"Girl, what made thet blood on your mouth?"

"Riggs hit me!" she whispered. Then at something she feared or saw or
divined she shrank back, dropped on her knees, and crawled into the
spruce shelter.

"Wal, Riggs, I'd invite you to draw if thet 'd be any use," said Wilson.
This speech was reflective, yet it hurried a little.

Riggs could not draw nor move nor speak. He seemed turned to stone,
except his jaw, which slowly fell.

"Harve Riggs, gunman from down Missouri way," continued the voice of
incalculable intent, "reckon you've looked into a heap of gun-barrels in
your day. Shore! Wal, look in this heah one!"

Wilson deliberately leveled the gun on a line with Riggs's starting
eyes.

"Wasn't you heard to brag in Turner's saloon--thet you could see lead
comin'--an' dodge it? Shore you must be swift!... DODGE THIS HEAH
BULLET!"

The gun spouted flame and boomed. One of Riggs's starting, popping
eyes--the right one--went out, like a lamp. The other rolled horribly,
then set in blank dead fixedness. Riggs swayed in slow motion until a
lost balance felled him heavily, an inert mass.

Wilson bent over the prostrate form. Strange, violent contrast to the
cool scorn of the preceding moment! Hissing, spitting, as if poisoned by
passion, he burst with the hate that his character had forbidden him to
express on a living counterfeit. Wilson was shaken, as if by a palsy. He
choked over passionate, incoherent invective. It was class hate first,
then the hate of real manhood for a craven, then the hate of disgrace
for a murder. No man so fair as a gun-fighter in the Western creed of an
"even break"!

Wilson's terrible cataclysm of passio