"Reckon he shall be to-night," furiously retorted the first speaker. "I've said it--and Bitter Rube ain't the boy to go back on his word. That blanked white Injun, helpin' to dance around my pardners' sculps!" And a volley of curses drowned the speaker's utterance. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. IN A TIGHT PLACE. "Stranger--I guess I want this floor!" The place, an inner room partitioned off from Murphy's saloon; the time, late evening; the speaker a tall, half-drunken ruffian in frowsy miner's dress; the spoken to, Vipan--who, lounging against a table was chatting with the saloon-keeper; the tone, insolent and threatening to the last degree; the attitude, that of a man sure of his advantage. "Stranger--I guess I want this floor!" "And I guess you've got it," came the quick reply, but not more quickly than the change of attitude which it described. For, in a twinkling, a straight "right and left" from the shoulder had sent the aggressor to earth like a felled ox, while his pistol-bullet buried itself in the wall half a yard above Vipan's head. Then ensued a stupendous hubbub. Pistols cracked, as the stricken man's mates in the outer room hurled themselves at the partition door intent on taking up their comrade's quarrel. But the door, a solid slab one, met them in full career, pinning the foremost of their number half in, half out. "Now, Dan Harper, back's the word!" said the quiet, but stern voice of Smokestack Bill, to whose promptitude was due this first check to the enemy. "You move a little inch forward and you're a stiff, you bet." "Leggo the darn door, then--F-fixed t-tight," gasped the pinned one, who, with the muzzle of the scout's six-shooter within an inch of his nose, would willingly have obeyed, but could not. Smokestack Bill, however, relaxing his pressure, the crushed one was able to draw back, considerably bruised, into the outer room, and the door was jammed to, but not before a couple of bullets fired into the room had narrowly grazed Vipan's shoulder. "Now then, boys," called out the scout. "Anyone feel like trying an entrance? Better not, believe me." All this had befallen within infinitely fewer minutes than it takes to chronicle. The felled bully lay prone where he had first dropped, stunned, insensible, and motionless--and disarmed, for the first act of his adversary was to put it out of his power to get the advantage of them. The room, half filled with stifling smoke from the pistol-shots; the barricaded door, against which the besieged ones had run up a couple of casks; the two determined men, fully prepared to defend themselves at the expense of any number of their adversaries' lives; the fierce, threatening summons to yield entrance from the infuriated gang without; all went to make up a strange and startling metamorphosis on the hitherto quiet evening, which the two men had reckoned upon when they retired into the private room of the saloon-keeper to be clear of any disturbance.