The others were tense, ready to spring for cover, but Boone reared up his great figure. "Don't answer him, Pierre. You, Gandil, shut your face or I'll break ye in two." The fierce eyes of Pierre le Rouge never wavered from his victim, but he answered: "Keep out of this. This is _my_ party. I'll tell you why you'll stop gibbering, Gandil." He made a pace forward and every man shrank a little away from him. "Because the cold in your blood is part hate and more fear, Black Gandil." The eyes of Gandil glared back for an instant. With all his soul he yearned for the courage to pull his gun, but his arm was numb; he could not move it, and his eyes wavered and fell. The shaggy gray head of Jim Boone fell likewise, and he was murmuring to his savage old heart: "The good days are over. They'll never rest till one of 'em is dead, and then the rest will take sides and we'll have gun-plays at night. Seven years, and then to break up!" Dick Wilbur, as usual, was the pacifier. He strode across the room, and the sharp sound of his heels on the creaking floor broke the tension. He said softly to Pierre: "You've raised hell enough. Now let's go and get Jack down here to undo what you've just finished. Besides, you've got to ask her for that dance, eh?" The glance of Pierre still lingered on Gandil as he turned and followed Wilbur up the complaining stairs to the one habitable room in the second story of the house. It was set aside for the use of Jacqueline. At the door Wilbur said: "Shrug your shoulders back; you look as if you were going to jump at something. And wipe the wolf look off your face. After all, Jack's a girl, not a gunfighter." Then he knocked and opened the door. She lay face down on her bunk, her head turned from them toward the wall. Slender and supple and strong, it was still only the size of her boots and her hands that would make one look at her twice and then guess that this was a woman, for she was dressed, from trousers even to the bright bandanna knotted around her throat, like any prosperous range rider. Now, to be sure, the thick coils of black hair told her sex, but when the broad-brimmed sombrero was pulled well down on her head, when the cartridge-belt and the six-gun were slung about her waist, and most of all when she spurred her mount recklessly across the hills no one could have suspected that this was not some graceful boy born and bred in the mountain-desert, willful as a young mountain lion, and as dangerous. "Sleepy?" called Wilbur. She waited a moment and then queried with exaggerated impudence: "Well?" Ennui unspeakable was in that drawling monotone. "Brace up; I've got news for you. And I've brought Pierre along to tell you about it." "Oh!" And she sat bolt upright with shining eyes. Instantly she remembered to yawn again, but her glance smiled on them above her hand. She apologized. "Awfully sleepy, Dick."