“Ha!  I knew it.  Your neck cords quiver.”

The gambler grimaced.  “I can’t do it.  If I could, I’d have shot you before you turned.  But you’ll have to fight, you dog.  Get up and draw.”

Roy refused.  “I gave Cherry my gun.”

“Yes, and more too,” the man gritted.  “I saw it all.”

Even yet Glenister had made no slightest move, realizing that a feather’s weight might snap the gambler’s nervous tension and bring the involuntary twitch that would put him out swifter than a whip is cracked,

“I have tried it before, but murder isn’t my game.”  The Kid’s eye caught the glint of Cherry’s revolver where she had discarded it.  “There’s a gun—­get it.”

“It’s no good.  You’d carry the six bullets and never feel them.  I don’t know what this is all about, but I’ll fight you whenever I’m heeled right.”

“Oh, you black-hearted hound,” snarled the Kid.  “I want to shoot, but I’m afraid.  I used to be a gentleman and I haven’t lost it all, I guess.  But I won’t wait the next time.  I’ll down you on sight, so you’d better get ironed in a hurry.”  He backed out of the room into the semi-darkness of the kitchen, watching with lynx-like closeness the man who sat so quietly under the shaded light.  He felt behind him for the outer door-knob and turned it to let in a white sheet of rain, then vanished like a storm wraith, leaving a parched-lipped man and a zigzag trail of water, which gleamed in the lamplight like a pool of blood.

CHAPTER XVIII

WHEREIN A TRAP IS BAITED

Glenister did not wait long after his visitor’s departure, but extinguished the light, locked the door, and began the further adventures of this night.  The storm welcomed him with suffocating violence, sucking the very breath from his lips, while the rain beat through till his flesh was cold and aching.  He thought with a pang of the girl facing this tempest, going out to meet the thousand perils of the night.  And it remained for him to bear his part as she bore hers, smilingly.

The last hour had added another and mysterious danger to his full measure.  Could the Kid be jealous of Cherry?  Surely not.  Then what else?

The tornado had driven his trailers to cover, evidently, for the streets were given over to its violence, and Roy encountered no hostile sign as he was buffeted from house to house.  He adventured cautiously and yet with haste, finding certain homes where the marshals had been before him peopled now only by frightened wives and children.  A scattered few of the Vigilantes had been taken thus, while the warring elements had prevented their families from spreading the alarm or venturing out for succor.  Those whom he was able to warn dressed hurriedly, took their rifles, and went out into the drifting night, leaving empty cabins and weeping women.  The great fight was on.

Towards daylight the remnants of the Vigilantes straggled into the big blank warehouse on the sand-spit, and there beneath the smoking glare of lanterns cursed the name of McNamara.  As dawn grayed the ragged eastern sky-line, Dextry and Slapjack blew in through the spindrift, bringing word from Cherry and lifting a load from Glenister’s mind.