Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack’s lips or the glint in his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy’s eyes.  His voice went well with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the audible corollary of the glint.  Every man knew that, despite his gay adornment, he was not bluffing.  He had made his proposition in deadly earnest and was ready to carry it out.  Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder burning under the easy grip of Jack’s hand.  From the bore of the unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze sheepishly.

“Oh, h—­l!” he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his limited vocabulary its character.  “Oh, h—­l!  I was just trying you out as a tenderfoot—­a little joke!”

At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief.  The inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face to face, with the result that all became piously sober.

“Then it is all right?  I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even your susceptibilities,” said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed, he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.

Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent of reaction.  He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled with by a grinning tenderfoot.  Rage mounted red to his brow.  No man who had humiliated him should live.  He would have shot Jack in the back if it had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers.  Jim had not joined in the laugh over Pete’s explanation; he had remained impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he knocked Leddy’s revolver down showed that this immovability had let nothing escape his quiet observation.

When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face was without the smile.  It was set and his body had stiffened free of the counter.

“I’ll take the gun away from him.  It’s high time somebody did,” said Galway.

“I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to fight,” said Jack.  “I have wondered how he got the six.  Presumably he murdered them.”

“To their faces, as I’ll get you!” Leddy answered.  “I’ll play your way now, one, two, three—­fire!”

Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot, turned to Jack: 

“It’s not worth your being a target for a dead shot,” he said.

“In the morning, yes,” answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way that swept the audience with uncanniness.  “But to-night I am engaged.  Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East.”

“Well, are you going to let me go?” Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in appeal to the loungers, who were his men.