“None of that now,” cautioned Racey Dawson, his right hand flashing down and up, as McFluke, finding that escape was out of the question, made a desperate snatch at the knife-handle protruding from his bootleg.

The saloon-keeper reacted immediately to the cold menace of the gun-muzzle pressing against the top of his spinal column.  He straightened sullenly.  Racey, transferring the gun-muzzle to the small of McFluke’s back, stooped swiftly, drew out McFluke’s knife and tossed it through a window.

“You won’t be needing that again,” said Racey Dawson.  “Help yoreself, Kansas.”

Which the deputy promptly proceeded to do by snapping a pair of handcuffs round the thick McFluke wrists.

“Whatell you trying to do?” bawled McFluke in a rage.  “I ain’t done nothing!  You can’t prove I done nothing!  You—­”

“Shut up!” interrupted Kansas Casey, giving the handcuffs an expert twitch that wrenched a groan out of McFluke.  “Proving anything takes time.  We got time.  You got time.  What more do you want?”

The efficient deputy towed the saloon-keeper round the bar and out into the barroom.  He faced him about in front of Jake Rule.  The sheriff fixed him with a grim stare.

“What did you try to run for, Mac?” he demanded.

“I had business outdoors,” grumbled McFluke.

“What kind of business?”

“What’s that to you?  You ain’t got no license to grab a-hold of me and stop me from transacting my legitimate business whenever and wherever I feel like it.”

“You seem to know more about it than I do.  Alla same unless you feel like telling me exactly what all yore hurry was for, we’ll have to hold you for a while.  Yo’re shore it didn’t have nothing to do with yore saying the stranger run out the door and Thompson saying he jumped through the window?”

“Why, shore I am,” grunted McFluke.

“Glad to hear that.  But how is it you and Thompson seen the same thing different ways?  It’s a cinch the stranger, not being twins, didn’t use both the door and the window.  Yo’re shore he run out the door, Mac?”

“Shore I am.  I seen him, I tell you.”  But McFluke’s tone rang flat.

“Punch,” said the sheriff to Thompson who, in company with everyone else in the room had crowded round the sheriff and the prisoner, “Punch, how did the stranger who shot Dale leave the room?”

“Through the window, like I said,” Thompson declared, defiantly.  “Ask anybody.  They all seen him.  Mac’s drunk or crazy.”

“Yo’re a liar!” snarled McFluke.  “I tell you he run out the door.”

“Aw, close yore trap!” requested Thompson with contempt.  “You ain’t packin’ no gun.”

“Lanpher,” said the sheriff, “how did the murderer get away.”

“Through the window,” was the prompt reply of the 88 manager.

The sheriff asked Harpe, Coffin, Tweezy, and the others who had been present at the killing, for their versions.  In every case, each had seen eye-to-eye with Thompson.  The evidence was overwhelmingly against the saloon-keeper.  But he, a glint of fear in his hard blue eyes, stuck to his original statement, swearing that all men were liars and he alone was telling the truth.