He stood stone-still a moment, looking in at them with that queer expression in his eyes.  Then he stepped forward swiftly and closed the door.  He had glanced sharply at the girl by the fire; she had shaded her eyes with her hand, the shadow of which lay across her face.  He turned again from her to the men, his regard chiefly for Hap Smith.

“Well?” he said lightly, being the first to break the silence.  “What’s wrong?”

There are moments in which it seems as if time itself stood still.  During the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him.  By his sheer physical bigness, first, he fascinated her.  He was like the night and the storm itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint; but rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile after unfenced mile “out yonder” beyond the mountains.  As he moved he gave forth a vital impression of immense animal power; standing still he was dynamic.  A sculptor might have carved him in stone and named the result “Masculinity.”

The brief moment in which souls balanced and muscles were chained passed swiftly.  Strangely enough it was old man Adams who precipitated action.  The old man was nervous; more than that, bred here, he was fearless.  Also fortune had given him a place of vantage.  His body was half screened by that of Hap Smith and by a corner of the bar.  His eager old hand snatched out Hap Smith’s dragging revolver, levelled it and steadied it across the bar, the muzzle seeking the young giant who had come a step forward.

“Hands up!” clacked the old man in tremulous triumph.  “I got you, dad burn you!” And at the same instant Hap Smith cried out wonderingly: 

“Buck Thornton!  You!”

The big man stood very still, only his head turning quickly so that his eyes were upon the feverish eyes of old man Adams.

“Yes,” he returned coolly.  “I’m Thornton.”  And, “Got me, have you?” he added just as coolly.

Winifred Waverly stiffened in her chair; already tonight had she heard gunshots and smelled powder and seen spurting red blood.  A little surge of sick horror brought its tinge of vertigo and left her clear thoughted and afraid.

“Hands up, I say,” repeated the old man sharply.  “I got you.”

“You go to hell,” returned Thornton, and his coolness had grown into curt insolence.  “I never saw the man yet that I’m going to do that for.”  He came on two more quick, long strides, thrust his face forward and cried in a voice that rang out commandingly above the crash of the wind, “Drop that gun!  Drop it!”

Old man Adams had no intention of obeying; he had played poker himself for some fifty odd years and knew what bluff meant.  But for just one brief instant he was taken aback, fairly shocked into a fluttering indecision by the thunderous voice.  Then, before he could recover himself the big man had flung a heavy wet coat into Adams’s face, a gun had been fired wildly, the bullet ripping into the ceiling, and Buck Thornton had sprung forward and whipped the smoking weapon from an uncertain grasp.  Winifred Waverly, without breathing and without stirring, saw Buck Thornton’s strong white teeth in a wide, good humoured smile.