He reached out suddenly, and with his bare, open palm slapped Taggart's face; and Taggart staggered backward under the blow until his thick shoulders brought up against the wall with such a thud that the cabin shuddered under the impact. "Get up, Joe!" growled Standing. "You're another yellow dog, but ... get up and come here!" Joe scrambled to his feet and came hurrying. Standing kept his rifle in his right hand. Using his left stiffly, he got out his knife and cut the Mexican's bonds. "Go!" he cried savagely. "While you've got legth under you! And thith time keep clear, or hell take you! I'm through with you ... you make me thick!..." Mexicali Joe, with one last frightened look over his shoulder, fled; they heard his running feet outside. He was jabbering unintelligibly as he fled: "_Señor Caballero!_ ... _Dios!_ ... those devils!..." Joe was gone. Bruce Standing's work was done. He looked grim and implacable, a man of iron heated in the red-hot furnace of rage. He yearned for Taggart to make a move; or for Gallup. Shipton, as a lesser cur, he ignored. They saw how white, as white as a clean sheet of paper, his face was; they did not fully understand why, since a man's face, when he is in a terrible rage, may whiten, as an effect of the searing emotion; they did not know how he had driven his wounded body all day long nor how sore his wound was. They could not guess that even now he was holding himself upright and towering among them through the fierce bending of his indomitable will. That same will he bent terribly for clean-cut articulation. "Taggart!" he said, and his voice rang as clear as the striking of an iron hammer upon a resounding anvil. "I'll tempt you to be a man such as you _once_ were, before you went yellow clean through ... and I'll show you, your _self_, how dirty a yellow you've gone! Pick up Young Gallup's rifle!" Taggart glared at him and muttered and hesitated, tugged one way by hatred and the madness of wrath, tugged the other way by his fear of the certainty of death. Lights, bluish lights, flickered in Timber-Wolf's eyes. He said again: "Pick up that rifle! Other_wise_, in _less_ than ten _sec_onds you are a dead man!" Taggart's face was red when Standing began to speak; ashen by the last word. Nervously and in great haste he stooped and caught up the gun. "You've got your _chance_, Jim Taggart! Your last _chance_! To fight it out, or say, for _these_ men to hear: 'I'm a dirty yellow dog!' If you're game we'll fight it out. I'll give you an even break; and we'll kill each other!"