e trigger guard the words, Gussie Stammer, alias
Blanche La Mode, showed. Everything was ready.

The major hesitated, though. He readjusted his paper and fidgeted his
pencil. He scratched his head and pulled at the little tuft of goatee
under his lower lip. Like many a more experienced author, Major Stone
was having trouble getting under way. He had his own ideas about a
fitting introductory paragraph. Coming along, he had thought up a full
sonorous one, with a biblical injunction touching on the wages of sin
embodied in it; but, on the other hand, there was to be borne in mind
the daily-dinned injunction of Devore that every important news item
should begin with a sentence in which the whole story was summed up.
Finally Major Stone made a beginning. He covered nearly a sheet of
paper.

Then, becoming suddenly dissatisfied with it, he tore up what he had
written and started all over again, only to repeat the same operation.
Two salty drops rolled down his face and fell upon the paper, and
instantly little twin blistered blobs like tearmarks appeared on its
clear surface. They were not tears, though--they were drops of sweat
wrung from the major's brow by the pains of creation. Again he poised
his pencil and again he halted it in the air--he needed inspiration. His
gaze rested absently upon the pistol; absently he picked it up and began
examining it.

It was a cheap, rusted, second-hand thing, poorly made, but no doubt
deadly enough at close range. He unbreeched it and spun the cylinder
with his thumb and spilled the contents into his palm--four loaded
shells, suety and slick with grease, and one that had been recently
fired; and it was discolored and flattened a trifle. Each of the four
loaded shells had a small cap like a little round staring eye set in the
exact center of its flanged butt-end, but the eye of the fifth shell was
punched in. He turned the empty weapon in his hands, steadying its
mechanism, and as he did so a scent of burnt powder, stale and dead,
came to him out of the fouled muzzle. He wrinkled his nose and sniffed
at it.

It had been many a long day since the major had had that smell in his
nostrils--many a long, long day. But there had been a time when it was
familiar enough to him. Even now it brought the clamoring memories of
that far distant time back to him, fresh and vivid. It stimulated his
imagination, quickening his mind with big thoughts. It recalled those
four years when he had fought