e made
one step forward, until he was within arm's reach of the humorist.

"Step out of my way, please," he said evenly.

Had the man been alone he would have complied, and quickly. No human
being with eyes and intelligence could have misread the warning on Ben
Blair's countenance. He started to move, when the girl who had first
come forward turned the tide.

"Aw, Charley!" she goaded. "Is that all the nerve you've got!" and she
laughed ironically.

Instantly the man's face reddened, and he fell back into his first
position.

"Sorry I can't oblige you, pal," he said, "but you see it's agin de
house. Us blokes has got--"

The sentence was never completed. Ben's fist shot out and caught the
speaker fair on the point of his jaw, and he collapsed in his tracks.
For a second no one in the room stirred; then before Ben could open the
door, the other men were upon him. The women fled screaming to the
farthest corner of the room, where they huddled together like sheep.
Returning with the tray, the old woman realized an only too familiar
condition.

"Gentlemen!" she pleaded. "Gentlemen!"

But no one paid the slightest attention to her. Forced by sheer odds of
mass toward a corner, Ben's long arms were working like flails. Another
man fell, and was up again. The first one also was upon his feet now,
his face white, and a tiny stream of blood trickling from his bruised
jaw. A heavy beer-bottle flung by one of the women crashed on the wall
over the countryman's head, the contents spattering over him like rain.
One of the men had seized a chair and swung it high, to strike, with
murder in his eye. Attracted by the confusion, the other occupants of
the floor had rushed into the hall. The door was flung open and
instantly blocked with a mass of sinister menacing faces.

Until then, Ben had been silent as death, silent as one who realizes
that he is fighting for life against overwhelming odds. Now of a sudden
he leaped backward like a great cat, clear of all the others. From his
throat there issued a sound, the like of which not one of those who
listened had ever heard before, and which fairly lifted their hair--the
Indian war-whoop that the man had learned as a boy. With the old
instinctive motion, comparable in swiftness to nothing save the passage
of light, the cowboy's hands went to his hips, and as swiftly returned
with the muzzles of two great revolvers protruding like elongated index
fingers. With equal swiftness, hi