The Kid, being young, had something of youth’s impatience, perhaps the only reminiscence of youth left in a calloused soul.  So it was that he had shot a second too soon.  Norton, as both hands rose in front of him, answered Kid Rickard with the smaller-caliber gun while the Colt in his right hand was concerned impartially with Galloway and Vidal Nunez, standing close together.  The Kid cursed, his voice rose in a shriek of anger rather than pain, and he spun about and fell backward, tripping over an overturned chair.

“Shoot, Galloway!” cried Norton.  “Shoot, damn you, shoot!”

Now, as for the second time that day the two men confronted each other, naked, hot hatred glaring out of their eyes, each man knew that he stood balancing a crucial second, midway between death and triumph.  Jim Galloway, who never until now had come out into the open in defiance of the law, must swallow his words under the eyes of his own gang, or once and for all forsake the semi-security behind his ambush.  Again issues were clear cut.

He answered the sheriff with a curse and a stream of lead.  As he fired he threw himself to the side, the old trick, his gun little higher than his hip, and fired again.  And shot for shot Norton answered him.

Though but half the length of a room lay between them, as yet, neither man was hurt.  For no longer were they in the rich light of the swinging coal-oil lamp; the room was gathered in pitch darkness; their guns spat long tongues of vivid flame.  For, just as Kid Ricard was falling, while Jim Galloway’s finger was crooked to the trigger, while Antone was whipping up his gun behind the bar, there had come a shot from the card-room door shattering the lamp.  Neither Norton nor Galloway, Rickard nor Vidal Nunez, nor Antone nor any of the other men in the room saw who had fired the shot.

As the light went out Norton leaped away from the door, having little wish to stand silhouetted against the rectangle of pale light from the outer night; and, leaping, he poured in his fourth and fifth and sixth shots in the quarter where he hoped to find Galloway.  But always he remembered where he had seen Elmer Page standing, and always he remembered Antone behind the bar, and Vidal Nunez drawn back into a corner.  His forty-five emptied, he jammed it back into its holster and stood rigid, staring into the blackness about him, every sense on the qui vive.  Galloway had given over shooting; he might be dead or merely waiting.  Vidal had held his fire, seeming frightened, uncertain, half stunned.  Antone would be leaning forward, peering with frowning eyes, trying to locate him.

It swept into Norton’s mind suddenly that thus, in utter and unexpected darkness, he had the upper hand.  He could shoot, the law riding upon each flying pellet of lead, and be it Jim Galloway or Antone or Vidal, or any other of Galloway’s crowd who fell, it would be a man who richly deserved what his fate was bringing him.  They, on the other hand, being many against one, must be careful which way they shot.