“Ten extra if you get to Elkhead before me.”

“They’s limits to hoss-flesh,” remarked Peters.  “What time you ridin’ against?”

“Against a cross between a bullet and a nor’easter, Gary.  I’m going back to drink to your luck.”

A promise which Buck Daniels fulfilled, for he had need of even borrowed strength.  He drank steadily until a rattle of hoofs down the street entered the saloon, and then someone came in to say that Gary Peters had started out of town to “beat all hell, on his red mare.”

After that, Buck started out to find Dan Barry.  His quarry was not in the barn nor in the corral behind the barn.  There stood Satan and Black Bart, but their owner was not in sight.  But a thought came to Buck while he looked, rather mournfully, at the stallion’s promise of limitless speed.  “If I can hold him up jest half a minute,” murmured Buck to himself, “jest half a minute till I get a start, I’ve got a rabbit’s chance of livin’ out the night!”

From the door of the first shed he took a heavy chain with the key in the padlock.  This chain he looped about the post and the main timber of the gate, snapped the padlock, and threw the key into the distance.  Then he stepped back and surveyed his work with satisfaction.  It would be a pretty job to file through that chain, or to knock down those ponderous rails of the fence and make a gap.  A smile of satisfaction came on the face of Buck Daniels, then, hitching at his belt, and pulling his sombrero lower over his eyes, he started once more to find Dan Barry.

He was more in haste now, for the sun was dipping behind the mountains of the west and the long shadows moved along the ground with a perceptible speed.  When he reached the street he found a steady drift of people towards O’Brien’s barroom.  They came by ones and twos and idled in front of the swinging doors or slyly peeked through them and then whispered one to the other.  Buck accosted one of those by the door and asked what was wrong.

“He’s in there,” said the other, with a broad and excited grin.  “He’s in there—­waitin’!”

And when Buck threw the doors wide he saw, at the farther end of the deserted barroom, Dan Barry, seated at a table braiding a small horsehair chain.  His hat was pushed far back on his head; he had his back to the door.  Certainly he must be quite unaware that all Brownsville was waiting, breathless, for his destruction.  Behind the bar stood O’Brien, pale under his bristles, and his eyes never leaving the slender figure at the end of his room; but seeing Buck he called with sudden loudness:  “Come in, stranger.  Come in and have one on the house.  There ain’t nothing but silence around this place and it’s getting on my nerves.”

Buck Daniels obeyed the invitation at once, and behind him, stepping softly, some of them entering with their hats in their hands and on tiptoe, came a score of the inhabitants of Brownsville.  They lined the bar up and down its length; not a word was spoken; but every head turned as at a given signal towards the quiet man at the end of the room.