Pence jerked his shoulder away and backed farther into the gloom of the cave. Old Man Selden quickly moved so that his body was not silhouetted against the light streaming in at the mouth. "I don't want none o' yer dam' fatherly advice," growled Pence. "I just want a square deal. If there's a reason why Drew oughta be left alone I want to know it. And I want to know it now!" "Just so! Are ye really mad, now, Pencie?" "I am mad!" "_And_ sober?" "Yes, sober. Shoot her out!" The eagle eyes of Old Man Selden were fixed intently on the face showing from the gloom. Every muscle was tense, every faculty alert. His beetling grey brows came down and hid his eyes from the younger man, but those cold blue eyes saw everything. "Bein's ye're sober, Obed," the old man drawled, "I'll be obliged to tell ye that no Poison Oaker ner any other man ever talked to me like you been doin' and got away with it. Just so! And, bein's ye're sober, I'll say that my business is my own, an' I'll keep her to myself till I get ready to tell her. Furthermore, I'm still runnin' the Poison Oakers, and what I say goes now same as a couple months ago. I know what's good for us boys better'n any o' the rest o' ye, and I'm doin' it." "You're a dam' liar!" shouted Pence. Old Man Selden's gun hand leaped to his hip. "Come a-shootin', kid!" he bellowed. He whipped out his Colt, shot from the hip. The roar of his big gun filled the cave. Screened by the smoke of it, Old Man Selden sprang nimbly to the deeper shadows. There he crouched, his cavernous eyes peering out through the dense, confined smoke like a lynx posing to spring upon a burrowing gopher. Obed Pence had not been slow. He too had leaped the instant the old man's hand dropped to his holster. He had ducked into deeper shadows still, and had not been hit. Now he fired through the smoke wreaths in the direction he supposed the old man had darted. A report from Adam's gun roared on the heels of his own, and rocks and earth rattled down a foot from his shoulder. The cave extended to right and to left of the opening. Each of the fighters was hidden by the darkness of his particular end, and now the smoke of the three shots hung in a heavy blanket between them directly opposite the door. Under cover of this Chuck and Bolar, sprawling flat, had wriggled frantically out of the cave. Each from his own nook, the belligerents leaned cautiously forward, guns ready, breath held in, and tried to pierce the rack of smoke and the obscurity of the other's hiding place. It seemed to the younger men, gazing in, that the situation meant a deadlock. Neither gunman could see the other, and, with no breath of air stirring in the cave, the smoke lay between them like a solid wall. Five minutes passed without a sound inside. Then Bolar drew nearer to the cave and shouted in: "What you gonta do? Neither o' you c'n see the other. You can't shoot. What you gonta do?"