So these were the Tremper boys, eh?  The worst desperadoes in the Southwest; and Bailey was their ally.  The watcher eyed them, mildly curious, and it seemed to him that they were as bad a quartette as rumour had painted—­bad, even, for this country of bad men.  The sheriff was a fool for getting mixed up with such people.  Shorty knew enough to mind his own business, anyway, if others didn’t.  He was a peaceful man, and didn’t intend to get mixed up with outlaws.  His mellow meditations were interrupted by the hoarse speech of the sheriff, who had broken down into his rage again, and struggled madly while words ran from him.

“Let me go! ——­ you, let me free.  I want to fight the coward that struck my wife.  You’ve killed her.  Who was it?  Let me get at him.”

Shorty stiffened as though a douche of ice-water had struck him.  “Killed her!  Struck his wife!” My God!  Not that sweet creature of his dreams who had talked and smiled at him without noting his deformity—­

An awful anger rose in him and he moved out into the light.

“Han’sup!”

Whatever of weakness may have dragged at his legs, none sounded in the great bellowing command that flooded the room.  At the compelling volume of the sound every man whirled and eight empty hands shot skyward.  Their startled eyes beheld a man’s squat body weaving uncertainly on the limbs of an insect, while in each hand shone a blue-black Colt that waved and circled in maddening, erratic orbits.

At the command, Marsh Tremper’s mind had leaped to the fact that behind him was one man; one against five, and he took a gambler’s chance.

As he whirled, he drew and fired.  None but the dwarf of Bar X could have lived, for he was the deadliest hip shot in the territory.  His bullet crashed into the wall, a hand’s breadth over Shorty’s “cow-lick.”  It was a clean heart shot; the practised whirl and flip of the finished gun fighter; but the roar of his explosion was echoed by another, and the elder Tremper spun unsteadily against the table with a broken shoulder.

“Too high,” moaned the big voice. “—­The liquor.”

He swayed drunkenly, but at the slightest shift of his quarry, the aimless wanderings of a black muzzle stopped on the spot and the body behind the guns was congested with deadly menace.

“Face the wall,” he cried.  “Quick!  Keep ’em up higher!” They sullenly obeyed; their wounded leader reaching with his uninjured member.

To the complacent Shorty, it seemed that things were working nicely, though he was disturbingly conscious of his alcoholic lack of balance, and tortured by the fear that he might suddenly lose the iron grip of his faculties.

Then, for the second time that night, from the stairs came the voice that threw him into the dreadful confusion of his modesty.

“O Ross!” it cried, “I’ve brought your gun,” and there on the steps, dishevelled, pallid and quivering, was the bride, and grasped in one trembling hand was her husband’s weapon.