-teaching the very man he had sent off
now to get his pistol to shoot himself with! He remembered how Talbot
had stood with Marley at this very tunnel's mouth and showed him how to
snuff a candle at thirty yards! And Denbigh stared and glowed with
admiration. Marley drew nearer down the path, his heavy crunching steps
echoing through the serene and frosty air. A few minutes more and he was
close upon the eager, expectant, silent circle; the men watched him with
their breath suspended. On he came, sullenly, filled with a sort of
dogged, brutal animosity against the man he had wronged and insulted. He
stepped between the men, who made a short line, and then into the clear
open space, facing Talbot.

For the first time he looked him full in the face, with a fugitive,
fleeting glance, and his eyes shifted away. His pace slackened, but he
did not stop; his feet dragged loosely over the rough snow and gravel,
his huge form seemed to shrink together, to lessen; while to the
fascinated eyes of the men watching the two, that slight figure at the
doorway, motionless as a statue, seemed to dominate the scene. Marley
felt a peculiar, sick paralysis stealing over him, a curious tugging
back of his muscles when he tried to get his hand to his hip, a
strangling feeling in his throat: that glance seemed petrifying him. The
absolute fearlessness, the indomitable will that filled it, seemed to
overcome him.

The very fact, perhaps, that Talbot had not even yet drawn his pistol,
the extreme coolness that relied upon the swiftness of his wrist to
draw it at a second's notice, staggered and scared him. He remembered
the skill that had long been his admiration, and that he had at last
learned to imitate, the sureness of aim and eye, the dexterity and
quickness of that hand, and his tongue fairly cleaved to the roof of his
dry mouth. He struggled to draw his revolver, but his arm refused to
obey his will. Yet it was not wholly cowardice that swept over him in a
sickly tide. As he had met those scornful, indignant eyes, there had
rushed back to his mind a thousand small benefits conferred upon him by
this man, a thousand instances of friendliness, the memory of the first
days they had worked together, how he had slept under his roof, fed at
his table, how, more than all, he had been given by him and instructed
in the use of this very weapon that now would be turned to the giver's
own breast. A horror of killing this man, of wounding him, firi