McClintock had no wish to start trouble. If he had known that Dutch was coming out of the Glory Hole he would have quietly absented himself. But the other man had forced the issue. The boy knew that any proposal to talk over the difficulty would have been regarded as a sign of weakness and would have precipitated an attack. Wherefore he had flung out his bold challenge. The Chief of Main Street was startled. Some months since, this boy had tossed a defiance in his teeth. Before he had had time to draw a weapon two bullets had crashed into him. The psychology of a killer is peculiar. Down in the bottom of his heart he is as full of superstitions as a gambler. Dutch was no coward, though he fought like a wolf outside of the code that governed more decent men. But he was not used to men like the McClintocks. Other men, when he raved and threatened, spoke humbly and tried to wheedle him back to good humour. In the very silence with which these two faced him was something menacing and deadly that paralyzed his fury. “Not now. Give you twenty-four hours,” the big man snarled through his beard. He used the fighting epithet, applying it to Scot McClintock. “Like yore brother did me when I was feelin’ sick an’ triflin’ an’ all stove up. Get out. Hit the trail on the jump. Or I’ll sure collect you, kid or no kid.” “You’re wasting time,” Hugh said quietly. The killer raved. He cursed savagely. But he did not draw his six-shooter. The man had his crafty reasons. This youngster was chain lightning on the shoot. The evidence of this was scarred on the body of Dutch. Moreover, he could probably take the boy at disadvantage later—get him from behind or when he came into a room dazed from the untempered light outside. Spitting his warning, Dutch backed into the Glory Hole. “Not room for you’n me here both. Twenty-four hours. You done heard me.” The red-shirted miner Hank turned beaming on McClintock. He could appreciate this, though Clemens’s humour was too much for him. “You blamed li’l’ horn toad, if you didn’t call a bluff on Dutch and make it stick.” He used the same epithet that the desperado had just employed, but as it fell from his lips the sting of it was gone. A few years later a senator from the sagebrush state had occasion to explain away this expression on the floor of the upper house of Congress. His version of it was that this was a term of endearment in Nevada. Sometimes it was. Then, again, sometimes it was not. Hugh made no mistake. He had won the first brush, but he knew the real battle was still to come. CHAPTER XII “GIT OUT DE WAY, OLE DAN TUCKER” Hugh was no hero of romance, but a normal American youth whose education from childhood had fitted him to meet the emergencies that might confront him. The school of the frontier teaches self-reliance. Every man must stand alone. He is judged by the way he assays after the acid test of danger.