oint of steel. The victim
fell, his own weapon clutched in his hand, a fraction too late. The law
cleared the killer. It was "self-defense." "It was an even break," his
fellowmen said; although thereafter they were more reticent with him and
sought him out less frequently.

"It was an even break," said the killer to himself--"an even break, him
or me." But, perhaps, the repetition of this did not serve to blot out a
certain mental picture. I have had a bad man tell me that he killed his
second man to get rid of the mental image of his first victim.

But this exigency might arise again; indeed, most frequently did arise.
Again the embryo bad man was the quicker. His self-approbation now,
perhaps, began to grow. This was the crucial time of his life. He might
go on now and become a bad man, or he might cheapen and become an
imitation desperado. In either event, his third man left him still more
confident. His courage and his skill in weapons gave him assuredness and
ease at the time of an encounter. He was now becoming a specialist. Time
did the rest, until at length they buried him.

The bad man of genuine sort rarely looked the part assigned to him in
the popular imagination. The long-haired blusterer, adorned with a
dialect that never was spoken, serves very well in fiction about the
West, but that is not the real thing. The most dangerous man was apt to
be quiet and smooth-spoken. When an antagonist blustered and threatened,
the most dangerous man only felt rising in his own soul, keen and stern,
that strange exultation which often comes with combat for the man
naturally brave. A Western officer of established reputation once said
to me, while speaking of a recent personal difficulty into which he had
been forced: "I hadn't been in anything of that sort for years, and I
wished I was out of it. Then I said to myself, 'Is it true that you are
getting old--have you lost your nerve?' Then all at once the old feeling
came over me, and I was just like I used to be. I felt calm and happy,
and I laughed after that. I jerked my gun and shoved it into his
stomach. He put up his hands and apologized. 'I will give you a hundred
dollars now,' he said, 'if you will tell me where you got that gun.' I
suppose I was a trifle quick for him."

The virtue of the "drop" was eminently respected among bad men.
Sometimes, however, men were killed in the last desperate conviction
that no man on earth was as quick as they. What came near be