Could Ignacio be right?  Did Jack really know how to shoot?  Was he confident of the outcome?  Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed?  After all, had his attitude toward her been merely acting?  Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder?  No!  If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot.  He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.

“He will win—­he will win if Leddy plays fair!” Ignacio repeated.

Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Senor Don’t Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe.  After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of gratitude for a favor done.  Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.

And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential.  He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May.  His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon.  Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism.  If Jack’s bearing was amateurish, then Pete’s was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline.

Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the barrels lay even with the trousers seams.  They awaited the word to fire which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men, was to give.

“Wait!” Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had recurred to him.  Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant, shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping over glare ice.

“Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish—­honestly, we are!” he said.  “The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler!  Why, if I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have whistled again.  If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I—­”

“No, you don’t!” yelled Leddy.  “I’ve waited long enough!  It’s fight, you—­”

“Oh, all right!  You are so emphatic,” Jack answered.  His voice was still pleasant, but shot with something metallic.  The very shadow of him seemed to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.