As he faced the man he was going to kill it flitted vaguely through Durkin’s mind that somebody—he could not remember who—had said always to shoot for the stomach—it was the easiest, and the surest. He also remembered that his weapon had a rifled barrel, and that the long, twisting bullet would rend and tear and lacerate as it went. “Before I kill you,” he heard himself saying, and the quietness of his voice surprised even his own ears, “before I kill you, I want to know, once for all, just _what that woman is to you_.” The other man looked vacantly down at the pistol barrel, within six inches of his own gross stomach. Then he looked at his enemy’s face. A twitching nerve trembled and fluttered on one side of his temple. Only two claret-colored blotches of color remained on his otherwise ashen face. “For the love of God, Durkin, don’t be a fool!” MacNutt’s fingers were working spasmodically, and his breath began to come wheezily and heavily. “I’m going to kill you!” repeated Durkin, in the same level monotone. “_But what is that woman to you?_” MacNutt was desperately measuring chance and distance. There was not the shadow of escape through struggle. “It’s murder!” he gasped, certain that there was no hope. He could see Durkin’s preparatory jaw-clench. “You—you wouldn’t get mixed up in cold murder like this!” MacNutt half pleaded, hurriedly and huskily, with his eyes now on the other man’s. “Why, you’d swing for it, Durkin! You’d go to the chair!” Durkin uttered a foul name, impatiently, and closed out the picture with his shut eyelids as he thrust his right hand forward and down. He wondered, with lightning-like rapidity of thought, if the blood would stain his hand. Then he felt a quick bark, and a sudden great spit of pain shot through him. The gun had exploded, he told himself dreamily, as he staggered to the wall and leaned there weakly, swaying back and forth. But why didn’t MacNutt go down? he asked himself unconcernedly, as he watched with dull eyes where a jet of red blood spurted and pumped regularly from somewhere in his benumbed forearm. Then he had a thin and far-away vision of Frances, with a smoking revolver in her hand, drifting out from the other room. He seemed to see her floating out, like a bird on the wing almost, to where his own weapon lay, and catch it up, as MacNutt or some vague shadow of him, leaped to put a heavy foot on it. A hundred miles away, seemingly, he heard her voice in a thin and high treble telling MacNutt to go, or she would shoot him there herself, like a dog. Succeeding this came a sense of falling, and he found something bound tightly round his arm, and a new dull and throbbing pain as this something twisted and twisted and grew still tighter on the benumbed flesh. Then he felt the weight of a body leaning on his own, where he lay there, and a hand trying to fondle his face and hair.