“Yes, you bet!” came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager to concur.

“Now, Pete and Ropey,” Jack began, and broke off.

There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind.  Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its flood past the barrier of her thumb.  Jack kept his bead unremittingly on Pete.  It was Firio who broke the silence.

“Kill him!  He is bad!  He hates you!” said Firio.

“Si, si!  If you do not kill him now, you must some time,” said Ignacio.

Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice influence him.  On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy’s death.  Now she wished for him to go away unharmed.  She wished it in the name of her own responsibility for all that had happened.  Yet her tongue had no urging word to offer.  She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on Jack’s decision.  It was as if he were to answer one more question in explanation of the mystery of his nature.  Could he deliberately shoot down an unarmed man?  Was he that hard?

“I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey,” Jack proceeded.  “As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of Little Rivers.  You can live under one condition—­that you leave town and never return armed.  Half a minute to decide!”

“I’ll go!” said Pete.

“I’ll go!” said Ropey.

“And keep your words?”

“Yes!” they assented.

But neither moved.  The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his revolver made them cautious.  They were obviously over-anxious to play safe to the last.

“Then go!” called Jack.

Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey’s gun, which was unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete’s precious companion of many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand.

“And, gentlemen,” Jack called to the spectators, “our little entertainment is over now.  I am afraid that you will be late for breakfast.”

Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly spontaneous.  Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the actors were left.  Pete and Ropey—­Bill Lang following—­walked away along the bed of the arroyo, instead of going over the bank.  Pete paused when he was out of range.  The old threat was again in his pose.

“I’m not through with you, yet!” he called.

“Why, I hope you are!” Jack answered.

He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness.  Mary wondered if he were going to faint.  She wondered if she herself were not going to faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in revolving grotesquery.  But the consciousness that she must not lift her weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some sort of equilibrium.