“How do you know I had a rattlesnake bite me?” asked the gunman, disconcerted at the unexpectedness of the question. The Texan’s eyes and face blazed into anger. His supple frame tightened, and his voice came, quick, sharp and electrifying. “Because you leave the mark of it on everything you touch, you prowling hound. You didn’t know it, but you might as well have signed your name, every time you posted a notice, you masked assassin. You left your thumb print, with the snake scar on it, on little Jimmy Coyle’s chaps and rifle. You’ve left it on this whisky glass, and it’s your confession and your death warrant, all rolled into one. Now, if you want to fight, draw and we’ll see if I have disgraced Texas.” Confronted thus suddenly and unexpectedly with evidence of his guilt, Tom Hoog was a fraction of a second late in reaching for his weapons. The young Texan had given the gunman a fair chance at the draw, but Hoog, for the first time in his life, was not equal to the emergency. Before his terrible guns were out of their holsters two bullets had been sent from the weapon of the crouching Texan. Hoog stood for a moment, a wound in either arm, just above the elbow. His long, sinuous hands were powerless to grasp the revolvers that had never failed before. Then he fell in a heap on the floor. The men, who had prepared to rush from the room at the first sign of conflict, had not stirred. The fight had developed so unexpectedly, after every one believed that all signs of trouble were over, that even the most phlegmatic had been taken completely by surprise. Leaping over Hoog’s prostrate form the Texan ran through the open door. At the sound of the two shots the gamblers had ceased all play. Asa Swingley, who had just started a game at the head of the room, kicked over his chair and, drawing both guns, had started toward the barroom. He saw Bertram in the doorway, his smoking weapons in his hand. Instinctively Swingley raised both revolvers, but, before he could pull a trigger, Bertram had “creased” him twice, and the outlaw leader staggered to a chair. The Texan, firing from the hip, had disabled the second man even more quickly than the first.