Jack shifted his glance to Dade’s face, tense with anxiety while he waited.  He looked out over the slope dotted thickly with people, laughed briefly and mirthlessly, and then looked full at Bill.

“I reckon I’m going to kill him,” he said very quietly.

Big Bill stared.  “Say!  I’m glad I ain’t the greaser,” he said dryly, answering a certain something in Jack’s eyes and around his lips.  Bill had heard men threaten death, before now; but he did not think of this as a threat.  To him it seemed a sentence of death.

“Jack, you’ll be sorry for it,” warned Dade under his breath.  “Don’t go and—­”

“I don’t want to hear any remarks on the subject.”  Never in all the years of their friendship had Jack spoken to him in so harsh a tone.  “God Almighty couldn’t talk me out of it.  I’m going to kill him.  Let it go at that.”  He turned abruptly and walked away to the stable, and the two stood perfectly still and watched him out of sight.

“He’ll do it, too,” said Dade distressfully.  “There’s something in this I don’t understand—­but he’ll do it.”

CHAPTER XXII

THE BATTLE OF BEASTS

Sweating, impatient humans wedged tight upon the seats around the rim of the great adobe corral, waited for the bulls to dash in through the gate and be goaded into the frenzy that would thrill the spectators pleasurably.  Meantime, those spectators munched sweets and gossiped, smoked cigarettes and gossiped; sweltered under the glare of the sun and gossiped; and always they talked of the gringos, who had come one hundred strong and never a woman among them; one hundred strong, and every man of them dangling pistols at his hips—­pistols that could shoot six times before they must be reloaded, and shoot with marvelous exactness of aim at that; one hundred strong, and every one of the hundred making bets that the gringo with the red-brown hair would win the medalla oro from Don Jose, who three times had fought and kept it flashing on his breast, so that now no vaquero dared lift eyes to it!

Truly, those gringos were a mad people, said the gossips.  They would see the blue-eyed one flung dead upon the ground, and then—­would the gringos want to fight?  Knives were instinctively loosened under sashes when the owners talked of the possibility.  Knives are swift and keen, but those guns that could shoot six times with one loading—­Gossip preferred to dwell greedily upon the details of the quarrel between the young Don Jose and his gringo rival.

There were whispers also of a quarrel between the senorita and her gringo lover, and it was said that the young senorita prayed last night that Jose would win.  But there were other whispers than that:  One, that the maid of the senorita had been seen to give a rose and a written message into the hands of the Senor Allen, not an hour ago; and had gone singing to her mistress again, and smiling while she sang.