But Durand, used to the fetid atmosphere of bar-rooms and to the soft living of the great city, found his nerve beginning to crack under the strain.  Cold drops stood out on his forehead and his hands shook from excitement and anxiety.  What kind of a man was his enemy to lie there in the black silence and not once give a sign of where he was, in spite of crashing bullets?  There was something in it hardly human.  For the first time in his life Jerry feared he was up against a better man.

Was it possible that he could have killed the fellow at the first shot?  The comfort of this thought whispered hope in the ear of the ex-prize-fighter.

A chair crashed wildly.  Durand fired again and yet again, his nerves giving way to a panic that carried him to swift action.  He could not have stood another moment without screaming.

There came the faint sound of a hand groping on the wall and immediately after a flood of light filled the room.

Clay stood by the door.  His revolver covered the crouching gang leader.  His eyes were hard and pitiless.

“Try another shot,” he advised ironically.

Jerry did.  A harmless click was all the result he got.  He knew now that the cowman had tempted him to waste his last shots at a bit of furniture flung across the room.

“You’ll tell me what you did with Kitty Mason,” said Clay in his low, persuasive voice, just as though there had been no intermission of flying bullets since he had mentioned the girl before.

“You can’t kill me, when I haven’t a loaded gun,” Durand answered between dry lips.

The other man nodded an admission of the point.  “That’s an advantage you’ve got of me.  You could kill me if I didn’t have a gun, because you’re a yellow wolf.  But I can’t kill you.  That’s right.  But I can beat hell out of you, and I’m sure goin’ to do it.”

“Talk’s cheap, when you’ve got a loaded six-gun in your fist,” jeered Jerry.

With a flirt of his hand Clay tossed the revolver to the top of a book-case, out of easy reach of a man standing on the floor.  He ripped open the buttons of his overcoat and slipped out of it, then moved forward with elastic step.

“It’s you or me now, Jerry Durand.”

The prize-fighter gave a snort of derisive triumph.  “You damn fool!  I’ll eat you alive.”

“Mebbeso.  I reckon my system can assimilate any whalin’ you’re liable to hand me.  Go to it.”

Durand had the heavy shoulders and swelling muscles that come from years of training for the ring.  Like most pugilists out of active service he had taken on flesh.  But the extra weight was not fat, for Jerry kept always in good condition.  He held his leadership partly at least because of his physical prowess.  No tough in New York would willingly have met him in rough-and-tumble fight.

The younger man was more slightly built.  He was a Hermes rather than a Hercules.  His muscles flowed.  They did not bulge.  But when he moved it was with the litheness of a panther.  The long lines of shoulder and loin had the flow of tigerish grace.  The clear eyes in the brown face told of a soul indomitable in a perfectly synchronized body.