The gun was no longer a gun.  It was a part of him.  It was flesh of his flesh.  He had literally thought it out of the holster, and the report of the weapon had startled him more than it had frightened anyone else in the building.  He looked in amazement down to the broad expanse of his right hand.  It was trembling a little, as though, in fact, that hand were filled with electric currents.  He closed his fingers about the butt of the gun.  At once the hand became steady as a rock.  He toyed with the weapon in loosely opened fingers again, and it slid deftly.  It seemed impossible for it to fall into an awkward position.

The voice of Pete Reeve came from a great distance.  “And they’s only one thing lacking to make you perfect—­and that’s to have to fight once for your life and drop the other gent.  After that happens—­well, Pete Reeve will have a successor!”

How much that meant Bull Hunter very well knew.  The terrible fame of Pete Reeve ran the length and the breadth of the mountains.  Of course Bull did not for a moment dream that Pete meant what he said.  It was all figurative.  It was said to fill him with self-confidence, but part of it was true.  He was no longer the clumsy-handed Bull Hunter of the moment before.

A great change had taken place.  From that moment his very ways of thinking would be different.  He would be capable of less misty movements of the mind.  He would be capable of using his brain as fast as his hand acted.  A tingle of new life, new possibilities were opening before him.  He had always accepted himself as a stupidly hopeless burden in the world, a burden on his friends, useless, cloddish.  Now he found that he had hopes.  His own mind and body was an undiscovered country which he was just beginning to enter.  What might be therein was worth a dream or two, and Bull Hunter straightway began to dream, happily.  That was a talent which he had always possessed in superabundance.

The brief remainder of the day passed quickly; and then just before supper time a stranger came to call on Pete Reeve.  He was a tall, bony fellow with straight-looking eyes and an imperious lift of his head when he addressed anyone.  Manners was his name—­Hugh Manners.  When he was introduced he ran his eyes unabashedly over the great bulk of Bull Hunter, and then promptly he turned his back on the big man and excluded him from the heart of the conversation.  It irritated Bull unwontedly.  He discovered that he had changed a great deal from the old days at his uncle’s shack when he was used to the scorn and the indifference of all men as a worthless and stupid hulk of flesh, with no mind worth considering, but he said nothing.  Another great talent of Bull’s was his ability to keep silent.