"You're right--it wouldn't do. It would be plain murder, and I'm not quite
up to that. You know your men, don't you--you coyote's whelp! You know
I'll fight fair. You'll do yours underhandedly. Get up! There's your gun!
Load it! Let's see if you've got the nerve to face a gun, with one in your
own hand!"
"I'll do my fighting in my own way." Corrigan's eyes kindled, but he did
not move. Trevison made a gesture of contempt, and wheeled, to go. As he
turned he caught a glimpse of a hand holding a pistol, as it vanished into
a narrow crevice between a jamb and the door that led to the rear room. He
drew his own weapon with a single movement, and swung around to Corrigan,
his muscles tensed, his eyes alert and chill with menace.
"I'll bore you if you wink an eyelash!" he warned, in a whisper.
He leaped, with the words, to the door, lunging against it, sending it
crashing back so that it smashed against the wall, overbalancing some
boxes that reposed on a shelf and sending them clattering. He stood in the
opening, braced for another leap, tall, big, his muscles swelling and
rippling, recklessly eager. Against the partition, which was still
swaying, his arms outstretched, a pistol in one hand, trying to crowd
still farther back to escape the searching glance of Trevison's eyes, was
Braman.
He had overheard Trevison's tense whisper to Corrigan. The cold savagery
in it had paralyzed him, and he gasped as Trevison's eyes found him, and
the pistol that he tried to raise dangled futilely from his nerveless
fingers. It thudded heavily upon the boards of the floor an instant later,
a shriek of fear mingling with the sound as he went down in a heap from a
vicious, deadening blow from Trevison's fist.
Trevison's leap upon Braman had been swift; he was back in the doorway
instantly, looking at Corrigan, his eyes ablaze with rage, wild, reckless,
bitter. He laughed--the sound of it brought a grayish pallor to Corrigan's
face.
"That explains your nerve!" he taunted. "It's a frame-up. You sent the
deputy after me--pointed me out when I went into Hanrahan's! That's how he
knew me! You knew I'd come in here to have it out with you, and you
figured to have Braman shoot me when my back was turned! Ha, ha!" He swung
his pistol on Corrigan; the big man gripped the arms of his chair and sat
rigid, staring, motionless. For an instant there was no sound. And then
Trevison laughed again.
"Bah!" he said; "I can't use your methods! You're safe so long as you
don't move." He laughed again as he looked down at the banker. Reaching
down, he grasped the inert man by the scruff of the neck and dragged him
through the door, out into the banking room, past Corrigan, who watched
him wonderingly and to the front, there he dropped him and turning,
answered the question that he saw shining in Corrigan's eyes:
"I don't work in the dark! We'll take this case out into the sunlight, so
the whole town can have a look at it!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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