“Scatter nothing,” exploded Wagner, belligerently.  “Slide if you want to, if you’ve got cold feet.  I for one intend staying here as long as I see fit, Sweeney or no Sweeney.”

“You do, do you?” It was Manning this time who spoke, Manning with his deep-set eyes flashing over his high cheek bones.  “Well, maybe I’ve got something to say about that.”  He came out from behind the counter, faced the lanky figure before him, with deliberate contempt.  “You’re a mighty stiff-backed boy in the daytime, you are, Walt Wagner, but in the dark—­” He halted and his mouth curled in bitterest sarcasm.  “Why, if you’re so anxious for a scrap, don’t you run for marshal?  Why don’t you take the job right now and put Pete out of business?” And his mouth curled again.

Beneath its coat of tan Wagner’s face reddened; then went white.  Involuntarily his lip curled back like that of a cornered dog, and until it showed the lack of a prominent front tooth.

“Seeing you are so free with your tongue,” he retorted, “I might ask you the same question.  I ain’t no property interest here being destroyed like you have.  Why don’t you do the trick yourself, dad?”

For a moment there was silence, inaction; then of a sudden the old man stiffened.  With an effort almost piteous, he attempted to square his shoulders; but they remained round as before.

“Why don’t I?” He held up his right hand—­minus the index and middle fingers.  He held up his left, stiffened and shrivelled with rheumatism.  “Why don’t I?” He clumped the length of the tiny storeroom and back again; one crippled leg all but dragging.  “Why don’t I?” repeated for the third time.  “Do you imagine for the fraction of a second, Walt Wagner, that if I was back twenty years and sound like you are, I’d be asking another man why he didn’t do the job?” Terrible, almost ghastly, he stood there before them, the picture of bitter rage, of impotent, distorted senility.  “Have you got the last spark of manhood left in you, and ask that question of me?”

In the pockets of his trousers Wagner’s hands worked nervously.  His face went red again, but he gave no answer.  Bud Smith it was, Bud Smith, five-feet-two, with a complexion prairie wind had made like a lobster display in a cafe window, who had halted at the door, but who now came back, he it was who spoke.

“And while you’re in the talkin’ business,” he suggested slowly, “you might elab’rate what you meant a bit ago by intimatin’ that I had cold feet.  We’ll listen to that, too, any time you see fit to explain, pardner.”

“You want to know, do you?” Wagner’s countenance had become normal again, and with an effort at nonchalance he leaned his elbows back against the glass showcase, glancing the while down at the small man, almost patronisingly.  “Well, then, for your benefit, I was merely observing that you filled the bill of what dad here said a bit ago we all were.”  He smiled tantalisingly; again showing the vacancy in his dental arch.  “You remember what that was, don’t you?”