“Naturally,” Ford commented.  “You needn’t rawhide yourself for that.  You’ve been West often enough and long enough at a time to know the rules of the game—­not to be frivolous when the other fellow has the drop on you.”

“Wait,” said Lidgerwood.  “One minute later the cripple had sized us up for what we were.  The other three men were not armed.  I was, and Miss El—­the young woman knew it.  Also the cripple knew it.  He tapped the gun bulging in my pocket and said, in good-natured contempt, ’Watch out that thing don’t go off and hurt you some time when you ain’t lookin’, stranger.’  Ford, I think I must have been hypnotized.  I stood there like a frozen image, and let that crippled cow-rustler rob those two women—­take the rings from their fingers!”

“Oh, hold on; there’s another side to all that, and you know it,” the vice-president began; but Lidgerwood would not listen.

“No,” he protested; “don’t try to find excuses for me; there were none.  The fellow gave me every chance; turned his back on me as an absolutely negligible factor while he was going through the others.  I’m quick enough when the crisis doesn’t involve a fighting man’s chance; and I can handle a gun, too, when the thing to be shot at isn’t a human being.  But to save my soul from everlasting torments I couldn’t go through the simple motions of pulling the pistol from my pocket and dropping that fellow in his tracks; couldn’t and didn’t.”

“Why, of course you couldn’t, after it had got that far along,” asserted Ford.  “I doubt if any one could.  That little remark about the gun in your pocket did you up.  When a man gets you pacified to the condition in which he can safely josh you, he has got you going and he knows it—­and knows you know it.  You may be twice as hot and bloodthirsty as you were before, but you are just that much less able to strike back.  It’s not a theory; it is a psychological demonstration.”

“But the fact remained,” said Lidgerwood, sparing himself not at all.  “I was weighed and found wanting; that is the only point worth considering.”

“Well?” queried Ford, when the self-condemned culprit turned again to the dusk-darkened window, “what came of it?”

“That which was due to come.  I was told many times and in many different ways what the one woman thought of me.  For the few days during which she and her mother waited at her father’s mine for the coming of the Yellowstone party, she used me for a door-mat, as I deserved.  That was a year ago last spring.  I haven’t seen her since; haven’t tried to.”

The vice-president reached up and snapped the key of the electric bulb over the desk, and the lurking shadows in the corners of the room fled away.

“Sit down,” he said shortly; and when Lidgerwood had found a chair:  “You treat it as an incident closed, Howard.  Do you mean to go on leaving it up in the air like that?”

“It was left in the air a year ago last spring.  I can’t pull it down now.”