“But that proves nothing as to how it would work out in real action,” said Johnny thoughtfully.
The afternoon of the third day, while we were resting from the heat beneath the shade of our tree, we were approached by three men.
“THE BIG MAN WHIRLED TO THE FLOOR”
“Howdy, boys,” said the first. “We hain’t seen you around camp lately, and thought mebbe you’d flew.”
“We are still here,” replied Johnny with smooth politeness. “As you see, we have been fixing our quarters to stay here.”
“Scar-face Charley is here, too,” observed the spokesman, “and he wanted me to tell you that he is going to be at the Bella Union at eight this evenin’, and he wants to know, will he see you? and to come heeled.”
“Thank you, gentlemen,” replied Johnny quietly. “If by accident you should happen to see the desperado in question–who, I assume, can be in no way your friend–I hope you will tell him that I, too, will be at the Bella Union at eight o’clock, and that I will come heeled.”
“You’ll be comin’ alone?” said the man, “or p’rhaps yore friend─”
“My friend, as you call him, is simply a miner, and has nothing to do with this,” interrupted Johnny emphatically.
“I thank you, sir,” said the spokesman, rising.
The other two, who had throughout said no word, followed his example.
“Do you know Danny Randall?” asked Johnny as they moved off.
If he had presented his derringer under their noses, they could not have stopped more suddenly. They stared at each other a moment.
“Is he a friend of yours?” inquired the spokesman after an uncertain moment.
“He likes fair play,” said Johnny enigmatically.
The trio moved off in the direction of town.
“We don’t know any more about Danny Randall than we did,” observed Johnny, “but I tried a shot in the dark.”
“Nevertheless,” I told him, “I’m going to be there; and you want to make up your mind to just that.”
“You will come, of course,” agreed Johnny. “I suppose I cannot keep you from that. But Jim,” he commanded earnestly, “you must swear to keep out of the row, unless it develops into a general one; and you must swear not to speak to me or make any sign no matter what happens. I must play a lone hand.”
He was firm on this point; and in the end I gave my promise, to his evident relief.
“This is our visitors’ day, evidently,” he observed. “Here come two more men. One of them is the doctor; I’d know that hat two miles.”
“The other is our friend Danny Randall,” said I.
Dr. Rankin greeted us with a cordiality I had not suspected in him. Randall nodded in his usual diffident fashion, and slid into the oak shadow, where he squatted on his heels.
“About this Scar-face Charley,” he said abruptly, “I hear he’s issued his defi, and you’ve taken him up. Do you know anything about this sort of thing?”
“Not a bit,” admitted Johnny frankly. “Is it a duel; and are you gentleman here to act as my seconds?”
“It is not,” stated the downright doctor. “It’s a barroom murder and you cannot get around it; and I, for one, don’t try. But now you’re in for it, and you’ve got to go through with it.”
“I intend to,” said Johnny.
“It’s not precisely that,” objected Danny Randall, “for, d’ye see, he’s sent you warning.”
“It’s about all the warning you’ll get!” snorted the doctor.
“There’s a sort of rule about it,” persisted Randall. “And that’s what I’m here to tell you. He’ll try to come up on you suddenly, probably from behind; and he’ll say ‘draw and defend yourself,’ and shoot you as soon after that as he can. You want to see him first, that’s all.”
“Thanks,” said Johnny.
“And,” exploded the doctor, “if you don’t kill that fellow, by the Eternal, when you get a chance─”
“You’ll give him a pill, Doctor,” interrupted Randall, with a little chuckle. “But look here,” he said to Johnny, “after all, this sort of a mess isn’t required of you. You say the word and I’ll take on this Scar-face Charley and run him out of town. He’s a good deal of a pest.”
“Thank you,” said Johnny stiffly; “I intend to paddle my own canoe.”
Randall nodded.
“I don’t know as we can help you any more,” said he. “I just thought you ought to be on to the way it’s done.”
“I’m obliged to you,” said Johnny warmly. “The only doubt in my mind was when I was privileged to open.”
“I’d pot him through the window with a shotgun first chance I got,” stated the doctor; “that sort of a ruffian is just like a mad dog.”
“Of course you would, Doctor,” said Randall with just the faintest suspicion of sarcasm in his voice. “Well, I guess we’ll be toddling.”
But I wanted some information, and I meant to have it.
“Who is this Scar-face Charley,” I asked.
“Got me,” replied Randall; “you fellows seemed to recognize him. Only he’s one of the gang, undoubtedly.”
“The gang?”
“Oh, the general run of hangers-on. Nobody knows how they live, but every one suspects. Some of them work, but not many. There are a heap of disappearances that no one knows anything about; and every once in a while a man is found drowned and floating; floating mind you!”
“What of that?” I asked; “drowned bodies usually float.”
“There’s no miner in these diggings but has gold enough in his belt to sink him. If a man floats, he’s been robbed, and you can tie to that reasoning. And the fellows are all well mounted, and given to mysterious disappearances.”
“In other words,” broke in the doctor, “they are an organized band of cut-throats and highway robbers making this honest camp a headquarters.”
“Pshaw, Doctor,” said Randall, “that’s by no means certain.”
“It’s certain enough,” insisted the doctor.
“I should think the miners would drive them out,” I said.
“Drive them out!” cried the doctor bitterly; “they’re too busy, and their own toes haven’t been trodden on, and they’re too willing to let well enough alone so as not to be interrupted in their confounded digging for gold.”
“They’re not organized and they are quite justly unwilling to get in a row with that gang when they know they’d be killed,” stated Randall quietly. “They’re getting on ‘well enough,’ and they’ll continue to be run by this lot of desperadoes until something desperate happens. They want to be let alone.”
The doctor recovered his equanimity with an effort.
“They present the curious spectacle,” said he thoughtfully, “of the individual man in a new untrammelled liberty trying to escape his moral obligations to society. He escapes them for a while, but they are there; and in the end he must pay in violence.”
Randall laughed and arose.
“If the doctor is going to begin that sort of thing, I’m going,” said he.
Our visitors took their departure.
“Oh, Doctor, one moment!” I called; then, as he returned. “Tell me, who and what is Danny Randall?”
“Danny Randall,” said the doctor, a humorous twinkle coming into his eyes, “is a gentleman of fortune.”
“And now we know a lot more than we did before!” said Johnny, as we watched the receding figures.
*
CHAPTER XXX
THE FIGHT
We ate a very silent supper, washed our dishes methodically, and walked up to town. The Bella Union was the largest of the three gambling houses–a log and canvas structure some forty feet long by perhaps twenty wide. A bar extended across one end, and the gaming tables were arranged down the middle. A dozen oil lamps with reflectors furnished illumination.
All five tables were doing a brisk business; when we paused at the door for a preliminary survey, the bar was lined
with drinkers, and groups of twos and threes were slowly sauntering here and there or conversing at the tops of their voices with many guffaws. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. Johnny stepped just inside the door, moved sideways, and so stood with his back to the wall. His keen eyes went from group to group slowly, resting for a moment in turn on each of the five impassive gamblers and their lookouts, on the two barkeepers, and then one by one on the men with whom the place was crowded. Following his, my glance recognized at a corner of the bar Danny Randall with five rough-looking miners. He caught my eye and nodded. No one else appeared to notice us, though I imagined the noise of the place sank and rose again at the first moment of our entrance.
“Jim,” said Johnny to me quietly, “there’s Danny Randall at the other end of the room. Go join him. I want you to leave me to play my own game.”
I started to object.
“Please do as I say,” insisted Johnny. “I can take care of myself unless there’s a general row. In that case all my friends are better together.”
Without further protest I left him, and edged my way to the little group at the end of the bar. Randall nodded to me as I came up, and motioned to the barkeeper to set me out a glass, but said nothing. Ours was the only lot away from the gaming tables not talking. We sipped our drink and watched Johnny.
After surveying coolly the room, Johnny advanced to the farther of the gambling tables, and began to play. His back was toward the entrance. The game was roulette, and Johnny tossed down his bets methodically, studying with apparent absorption each shift of the wheel. To all appearance he was intent on the game, and nothing else; and he talked and laughed with his neighbours and the dealer as though his spirit were quite carefree.
For ten minutes we watched. Then a huge figure appeared in the blackness of the doorway, slipped through, and instantly to one side, so that his back was to the wall. Scar-face Charley had arrived.
He surveyed the place as we had done, almost instantly caught sight of Johnny, and immediately began to make his way across the room through the crowds of loungers. Johnny was laying a bet, bending over the table, joking with the impassive dealer, his back turned to the door, totally oblivious of his enemy’s approach. I started forward, instantly realized the hopelessness of either getting quickly through that crowd or of making myself heard, and leaned back, clutching the rail with both hands. Johnny was hesitating, his hand hovering uncertainly above the marked squares of the layout, in doubt exactly where to bet. Scar-face Charley shouldered his way through the loungers and reached the clear space immediately behind his unconscious victim. He stopped for an instant, squared his shoulders, and took one step forward. Johnny dropped his chips on the felt layout, contemplated his choice an instant–and suddenly whirled on his heel in a lightning about-face.
Although momentarily startled by this unexpected evidence that Johnny was not so far off guard as he had seemed, the desperado’s hand dropped swiftly to the butt of his pistol. At the same instant Johnny’s arm snapped forward in the familiar motion of drawing from the sleeve. The motion started clean and smooth, but half through, caught, dragged, halted. I gasped aloud, but had time for no more than that; Scar-face Charley’s revolver was already on the leap. Then at last Johnny’s derringer appeared, apparently as the result of a desperate effort. Almost with the motion, it barked, and the big man whirled to the floor, his pistol, already at half raise, clattering away. The whole episode from the beginning occupied the space of two eye-winks. Probably no one but myself and Danny Randall could have caught the slight hitch in Johnny’s draw; and indeed I doubt if anybody saw whence he had snatched the derringer.
A complete silence fell. It could have lasted only an instant; but Johnny seized that instant.
“Has this man any friends here?” he asked clearly.
His head was back, and his snapping black eyes seemed to see everywhere at once.
No one answered or stirred. Johnny held them for perhaps ten seconds, then deliberately turned back to the table.
“That’s my bet on the even,” said he. “Let her roll!”
The gambler lifted his face, white in the brilliant illumination directly over his head, and I thought to catch a flicker of something like admiration in his passionless eyes. Then with his left hand he spun the wheel.
The soft, dull whir and tiny clicking of the ball as it rebounded from the metal grooves struck across the tense stillness. As though this was the releasing signal, a roar of activity burst forth. Men all talked at once. The other tables and the bar were deserted, and everybody crowded down toward the lower end of the room. Danny Randall and his friends rushed determinedly to the centre of disturbance. Some men were carrying out Scar-face Charley. Others were talking excitedly. A little clear space surrounded the roulette table, at which, as may be imagined, Johnny was now the only player. Quite methodically he laid three more bets.
“I think that’s enough for now,” he told the dealer pleasantly, and turned away.
“Hullo! Randall! hullo! Frank!” he greeted us. “I’ve just won three bets straight. Let’s have a drink. Bring your friends,” he told Randall.
We turned toward the bar and way was instantly made for us. Johnny poured himself a big drink of whiskey. A number of curious men, mere boys most of them, had crowded close after us, and were standing staring at Johnny with a curiosity they made slight attempt to conceal. Johnny suddenly turned to them, holding high his whiskey in a hand as steady as a rock.
“Here’s to crime, boys!” he said, and drank it down at a gulp. Then he stood staring them uncomprisingly in the face, until they had slunk away. He called for and drank another whiskey, then abruptly moved toward the door.
“I think I’ll go turn in,” said he.
At the door he stopped.
“Good-night,” he said to Randall and his friends, who had followed us. “No, I am obliged to you,” he replied to a suggestion, “but I need no escort,” and he said it so firmly that all but Randall went back.
“I’m going to your camp with you, whether you need an escort or not,” said the latter.
Without a word Johnny walked away down the street, very straight. We hurried to catch up with him; and just as we did so he collapsed to the ground and was suddenly and violently sick. As I helped him to his feet, I could feel that his arm was trembling violently.
“Lord, fellows! I’m ashamed,” he gasped a little hysterically. “I didn’t know I had so little nerve!”
“Nerve!” suddenly roared Danny Randall; “confound your confounded impudence! If I ever hear you say another word like that, I’ll put a head on you, if it’s the last act of my life! You’re the gamest little chicken in this roost, and I’ll make you beg like a hound if you say you aren’t!”
Johnny laughed a little uncertainly over this contradiction.
“Did I kill him?” he asked.
“No, worse luck; just bored him through the collarbone. That heavy little derringer ball knocked him out.”
“I’m glad of that,” said Johnny.
“Which I am not,” stated Danny Randall with emphasis. “You ought to have killed him.”
“Thanks to you I wasn’t killed myself. I couldn’t have hoped to get the draw on him with my holster gun. He is as quick as a snake.”
“I thought you were going to bungle it,” said Randall. “What was the matter?”
“Front sight caught at the edge of my sleeve. I had to tear it loose by main strength. I’m going to file it off. What’s the use of a front sight at close range?”
I heaved a deep sigh.
“Well, I don’t want ever to be so scared again,” I confessed. “Will you tell me, by all that’s holy, why you turned your back on the door?”
“Well,” said Johnny seriously, “I wanted to get him close to me. If I had shown him that I’d seen him when he first came in the door, he’d have opened fire at once. And I’m a rotten shot. But I figured that if he thought I didn’t see him, he’d come across the room to me
.”
“But he nearly got you by surprise.”
“Oh, no,” said Johnny; “I saw him all the time. I got his reflection from the glass over that picture of the beautiful lady sitting on the Old Crow Whiskey barrel. That’s why I picked out that table.”
“My son,” cried Danny Randall delightedly, “you’re a true sport. You’ve got a head, you have!”
“Well,” said Johnny, “I figured I’d have to do something; I’m such a rotten shot.”
*
CHAPTER XXXI
THE EXPRESS MESSENGER
We slept late the following morning, and awoke tired, as though we had been on a long journey.
“Now,” said Johnny, when our after-breakfast pipes had been lit, “we’ve got to get together. There’s two serious questions before the house: the first and most important is, who and what is Danny Randall?”
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