Six Feet Four | Page 9

looking in at them with that queer
expression in his eyes. Then he stepped forward swiftly and closed the
door. He had glanced sharply at the girl by the fire; she had shaded her
eyes with her hand, the shadow of which lay across her face. He turned
again from her to the men, his regard chiefly for Hap Smith.
"Well?" he said lightly, being the first to break the silence. "What's
wrong?"
There are moments in which it seems as if time itself stood still. During
the spellbound fragment of time a girl, looking out from under a
cupped hand, noted a man and marvelled at him. By his sheer physical
bigness, first, he fascinated her. He was like the night and the storm
itself, big, powerful, not the kind born to know and suffer restraint; but
rather the type of man to dwell in such lands as stretched mile after
unfenced mile "out yonder" beyond the mountains. As he moved he
gave forth a vital impression of immense animal power; standing still
he was dynamic. A sculptor might have carved him in stone and named
the result "Masculinity."
The brief moment in which souls balanced and muscles were chained
passed swiftly. Strangely enough it was old man Adams who
precipitated action. The old man was nervous; more than that, bred here,
he was fearless. Also fortune had given him a place of vantage. His
body was half screened by that of Hap Smith and by a corner of the bar.
His eager old hand snatched out Hap Smith's dragging revolver,
levelled it and steadied it across the bar, the muzzle seeking the young
giant who had come a step forward.
"Hands up!" clacked the old man in tremulous triumph. "I got you, dad
burn you!" And at the same instant Hap Smith cried out wonderingly:

"Buck Thornton! You!"
The big man stood very still, only his head turning quickly so that his
eyes were upon the feverish eyes of old man Adams.
"Yes," he returned coolly. "I'm Thornton." And, "Got me, have you?"
he added just as coolly.
Winifred Waverly stiffened in her chair; already tonight had she heard
gunshots and smelled powder and seen spurting red blood. A little
surge of sick horror brought its tinge of vertigo and left her clear
thoughted and afraid.
"Hands up, I say," repeated the old man sharply. "I got you."
"You go to hell," returned Thornton, and his coolness had grown into
curt insolence. "I never saw the man yet that I'm going to do that for."
He came on two more quick, long strides, thrust his face forward and
cried in a voice that rang out commandingly above the crash of the
wind, "_Drop that gun! Drop it!_"
Old man Adams had no intention of obeying; he had played poker
himself for some fifty odd years and knew what bluff meant. But for
just one brief instant he was taken aback, fairly shocked into a
fluttering indecision by the thunderous voice. Then, before he could
recover himself the big man had flung a heavy wet coat into Adams's
face, a gun had been fired wildly, the bullet ripping into the ceiling, and
Buck Thornton had sprung forward and whipped the smoking weapon
from an uncertain grasp. Winifred Waverly, without breathing and
without stirring, saw Buck Thornton's strong white teeth in a wide,
good humoured smile.
"I know you were just joking but..."
He whirled and fired, never lifting the gun from his side. And a man
across the room from him cried out and dropped his own gun and
grasped his shoulder with a hand which slowly went red.

Now again she saw Buck Thornton's teeth. But no longer in a smile. He
had seemed to condone the act of old Adams as a bit of senility; the
look in his eyes was one of blazing rage as this other man drew back
and back from him, muttering.
"I'd have killed you then," said Thornton coldly, his rage the cold wrath
that begets murder in men's souls. "But I shot just a shade too quick.
Try it again, or any other man here draw, and by God, I'll show you a
dead man in ten seconds."
He drew back and put the bar just behind him. Then with a sudden
gesture, he flung down the revolver which had come from Hap Smith's
holster and more recently from old man Adams's fingers, and his hand
flashed to his arm pit and back into plain sight, his own weapon in it.
"I don't savvy your game, sports," he said with the same cool insolence.
"But if you want me to play just go ahead and deal me a hand."
To the last man of them they looked at him and hesitated. It was