e doubted if he ever said
anything about that unexplained drama which occurred on the main street of
Eagle Pass on a Sunday morning, before the town was astir. But there was
the bartender at the Maverick--and besides, it would scarcely have been
possible for any man to do what Harboro had done without being seen by
numbers of persons looking out upon the street through discreetly closed
windows.

At any rate, there was talk in the town. By sundown everybody knew there
had been trouble between Harboro and Fectnor, and men who dropped into the
Maverick for a game of high-five or poker had their attention called to an
unclaimed blue-serge coat hanging from the ice-box.

"He got away with his skin," was the way the bartender put the case, "but
he left his coat."

There was a voice from one of the card-tables: "Well, any man that gets
Fectnor's coat is no slouch."

There were a good many expressions of undisguised wonder at Fectnor's
behavior; and nobody could have guessed that perhaps some sediment of
manhood which had remained after all the other decent standards had
disappeared had convinced Fectnor that he did not want to kill a man whom
he had injured so greatly. And from the popular attitude toward Fectnor's
conduct there grew a greatly increased respect for Harboro.

That, indeed, was the main outcome of the episode, so far as the town as a
whole was concerned. Harboro became a somewhat looming figure. But with
Sylvia ... well, with Sylvia it was different.

Of course Sylvia was connected with the affair, and in only one way. She
was the sort of woman who might be expected to get her husband into
trouble, and Fectnor was the kind of man who might easily appeal to her
imagination. This was the common verdict; and the town concluded that it
was an interesting affair--the more so because nearly all the details had
to be left to the imagination.

As for Sylvia, the first direct result of her husband's gun-play was that
a week or two after the affair happened, she had a caller--the wife of
Jesus Mendoza.

She had not had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been
entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite
Club, and that lower stratum identified with church "socials" and similar
affairs, did not know of Sylvia's existence--had decided definitely never
to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church
to the strains of the Lohengrin march. Nevertheless,