"He! He! He!" shrilled Two-Spot, warming to the liquor he had taken. "I'd 'a' liked to died when Jerry told about him. I could smell them hides before they turned th' corner of th' hotel that night. They was so odorous they near made me sick. An' if he went into 'em a Wolf, I'm sayin' he come out a Polecat; this range never will forget it. He can't never live it down--never! An' Jerry's tellin' it all along th' way, too. I'm wonderin' if he'll come back." Dailey laughed sarcastically. "I'm bettin' he won't. _No_ man would." "I'm shore _I_ wouldn't," chuckled Fanning. "I'd ship off to South Americky, _pronto_--an' I wouldn't care what happened to th' ship while I was on it, neither." "I'll take three to one he _does_ come back," said Dave. "Is twenty dollars too much?" asked Dailey. "Twenty to my seven suits me," replied Dave. "I'll take th' same from Jim, too." "Yo're on," chuckled Dailey. "Me, too," replied Fanning. A man slipped through the door, a gun in each hand. "Dave wins!" he snarled. "Keep 'em both on th' bar!" he snapped at Dave, who forthwith forgot, for the moment, all about the cap-and-ball. The little group in front of the bar stiffened into whatever postures they had been caught in, their eyes on the muzzles of the steady guns. Death hung poised on Wolf's thumbs like a hawk balanced in the blue, ready to strike. The only sounds in the room were the hushed breathing of four men facing destruction for the slightest slip, the insistent buzzing of a bee cruising across the ceiling and the soft _slip!_ _slip!_ of the gunman's feet as he slid them forward a few inches at a time. His face was ghastly and working with rage, his power concentrated in his dull, threatening weapons. He jabbed one of them at Two-Spot. "Step over there, on th' end!" he snapped. "I'll shoot at th' first move," he warned them all, feeling the hostility which he faced. Three of them were armed and needed only an instant's carelessness or indecision on his part to prove that their courage was only held in leash by calculating reason. "Not a move, cuss you!" he warned, his eyes not for a moment leaving the three armed men. Dailey's face was tense, but his body had slouched into a relaxation, the danger of which was well known to Wolf. Fanning's eyes were glinting and his lips were hard and thin, while enmity peered out of his eyes as though it were a living thing. Dave, his face paling after the redness of his first flush of anger, stood as a cat stands in the presence of a foe. Not for a fleeting instant did Wolf dare to take his eyes from this crouched danger. "You'd 'a' done better if you hadn't come back," said Dave, quietly, but the timbre of his voice sent a chill up Two-Spot's spine. "Don't move yore paws," snarled Wolf. "Two-Spot, come over here, by th' bar." Two-Spot obeyed, sullen and fearful, taking a place which shortened the arc of danger for Wolf. "Where was you that night?" demanded the gunman.