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  Alas it was a derby hat. I cannot tell what made an iron hat, as the derby was called, a mortal offense in the West, but it was. It required an almost presidential reputation to enable a man to keep one on his head. And what reputation had poor Sammy Gregg?

  Before he knew it, Lawson had loosed off a couple of bullets that struck the ground in front of Sammy and covered him with a stinging shower of dust and flying gravel. He jumped, of course, straight up into the air.

  It brought a shout of willing laughter from everyone. Because Lawson never appeared without his gang. I wish I could give a thorough picture of Lawson, but I can’t. Words become weak, speaking of the poisonous evil of such natures as his. He was that most gruesome combination—weakness and wickedness combined. He was a coward, a bully, a tyrant, a sneak, a moral wreck of a man, but he was a hero, in Munson, because he could shoot straight. And the consciousness that he could shoot straight always made him brave. Cowards always make the most horrible tyrants simply because they are so familiar with the emotion that they wish to inspire—fear.

  Now the weak mouth of Lawson stretched in a grin. And his little, close-set eyes gleamed under the shadow of his sombrero. He put another bullet neatly in the ground just where the feet of Sammy were about to land, and when they did land, Sammy naturally bounded into the air again.

  “Dance, confound you!” yelled Lawson.

  But Sammy stood still. He said nothing for a moment, but when another bullet struck the ground at his feet, he said calmly: “I don’t think I’ll dance.”

  Lawson was staggered, for suddenly he saw that this little man was not afraid. Then he broke out in a savage roar: “When you speak to a man, take off your hat, tenderfoot!”

  He did not wait for Sammy to obey. His gun spoke, and the bullet tore the hat from the head of Sammy. It was very close shooting, no one could deny that. It brought another roar of applause and laughter when the crowd saw Sammy instinctively duck. But then he leaned and picked up his hat and settled it, dusty as it was, upon his head once more.

  “You’ll come and liquor with me, kid,” said Lawson. “I’m going to see how your insides act when you get some of Mortimer’s poison inside of you. And bring the other dude along with you, boys.”

  Sammy could not keep the center of the stage very long. Not with such a counterattraction as had dismounted from the same train. It was a tall man, a tall, wide-shouldered, handsome man of thirty, perhaps, dressed in a fashion that Munson could not tolerate for an instant, in those days. He wore riding boots, to be sure, but the boots were not under his trousers, and that was a sin, of course. And above the boots rose neat whipcord riding breeches. And there was a well-fitted gray coat, and a gray shirt with a shining white stiff collar and a natty little bowtie, and this gentleman was finished off with a small gray felt hat on his head. And he carried a suitcase of large dimensions with C.O.F. stamped in big letters on the side of it.

  He made the counterattraction. He looked just as much of a tenderfoot as Sammy did, and there was more of him. The crowd surrounded him in an instant, and he and Sammy were huddled off toward Mortimer’s saloon in a trice.

  Huddled off with this difference, that whereas many hands were laid upon Sammy, urging him along, beating his derby hat down over his eyes, cuffing and pawing him, there was not so much as the tip of a finger laid upon the tall man. I cannot tell why. Perhaps it was the calmness of his face and eye. Perhaps it was the wrinkle of his coat between the shoulder blades, telling of ample muscles there. At any rate, although they milled about him, yelling and cursing and laughing, no one touched him and so the procession burst into Mortimer’s.

  He was the headquarters for such affairs, was Mortimer. He was also the gambling partner and the partner in secret murders who worked with my friend, Lawson. And he was only just a trifle less savory than Lawson. He greeted the new victims with a veritable yell of delight and instantly the glasses were set chiming upon the bar. And the big black bottles were spun out.

  Lawson stood at one end of the bar and gave directions. “To the top, kid. To the top, both of you. Fill up them glasses to the top, I tell you.”

  Sammy set his teeth and obeyed. He didn’t like it, but neither did he throw away his life for such a small affair as this. And so he filled as he was ordered.

  But, after that, a deadly hush fell over the barroom, for it was seen that the tall man, in spite of the order from Lawson, had not touched the waiting bottle to pour his drink. He spoke before the wrath of Lawson could descend upon him.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I shall be charmed to drink with you, but first I’d like to give you my name, if you don’t mind.”

  Chapter Three

  He spoke so mildly that they could hardly help but misunderstand him, and the snarl of mockery awoke instantly. However, Lawson appeared to scent an opportunity for further mischief than usual, and he raised his voice to control the murmur.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s hear your name, and damned if I don’t think that it ought to begin with Percy.”

  A poor jest, but Lawson did not have to invent very witty remarks in order to win the applause of his fellows. While the laughter was still ringing, however, the big stranger sauntered to the stove. It was a raw spring day with a whistling wind from the snow-tipped mountains of the north, prying through the cracks and sending long chill fingers of draft waving through the rickety saloon. The stove was packed with wood; the stove itself was red hot, and the door was open to throw out a greater draft. In that open door the poker lay, just as it had been dropped when the wood was last stirred and replenished. To this stepped the tall man and drew forth the poker and with it in his hand he approached the bar.

  He raised it, and with the white point he began to write upon the wood. He had half completed the first word of his writing before Mortimer intervened, for this audacity had paralyzed our saloonkeeper with rage and wonder. When his voice returned to him, it was like the challenging bellow of a bull. He clapped the muzzle of his revolver on the edge of the bar. Then from the ample throat of Mortimer throbbed a stream of cursing that filled the room with storming echoes.

  The tall man calmly laid down the poker—where it burned a deep gouge in the wood. His left hand glided out, unhurrying, but swift as the flick of a whiplash. It laid hold upon the barrel of Mortimer’s gun, so that the bullet of that gentleman hummed idly under the arm of the tenderfoot. And, at the same time, with his right hand he drew forth a hidden Colt revolver, long and heavy and black, and placed the muzzle against the breast of Mortimer, and fired.

  Mortimer, dead before he struck the floor, collapsed in a pool of crimson behind the bar.

  The silence that followed was so intense that the crowd could hear the ticking of a clock in the back room—and the hissing of the wood beneath the hot end of the poker as the tall man wrote the rest of his name upon the bar. Chester Ormonde Furness, he wrote, and stood back and dropped the poker to the floor while his name still smoked upon the bar.

  “That is my name, gentlemen,” he said. “I trust that you are glad to see me. Gladder, at least, than I am to see you. Because I have been over a considerable section of this little world and not even in Singapore, where the scum of the world is dropped after it has been skimmed from the pot . . . not even in Singapore, or in Shanghai or the New York slums . . . from which I think a good many of you have come . . . have I seen such a worthless lot of cowardly, sneaking riff-raff . . . fakers . . . sham giants . . . cur dogs wearing lion skins. And about the worst in this very bad lot seems to be Mister Lawson. Will you step out, Mister Lawson?”

  Lawson had not turned white. His complexion did not permit that color. But he turned a very pale greenish-yellow. He did not step forward. He whirled, instead, toward the door, and tried to spring through it. But, just at that moment, a gun fired behind him, and a .45-caliber Colt bullet cracked the door from top to bottom. Lawson did not make the mistake of imagining that it was a missed shot. He stopped in his tracks and turned slowly
back to face Chester Ormonde Furness.

  “Do you know my name?” said the stranger.

  “Yes, Mister Furness,” said Lawson.

  “Why I don’t finish you,” said Furness, “I hardly know. I suppose it’s because there is a sporting instinct in me and I like to have a little fun with my shooting. I like to give the game a start. So I am going to give you a start, Lawson. Go through that door and start up the street. I’ll follow you . . . with my gun.”

  Lawson did not wait for a second invitation. He sprang back through the door and Furness glided after him. And then the rest of awe-stricken Munson had sight of the terrible Lawson sprinting with all his might down the street while a tall dude stood in the road behind him and emptied a Colt—missing him by neatly calculated distances that the crowd could appreciate, for every time Furness fired, Lawson leaped to one side or the other with a wild howl until he found a corner to dodge around into safety.

  When Furness finished his shooting, he put away his gun, swiftly and neatly, so that no lump showed where it rested. Then he turned upon the gaping crowd—a tamed, humbled crowd, now grinning sheepishly in anticipation at him.

  “I detest trouble,” said Furness. “I always strive to avoid it. And I want you to remember what I say. I want you to remember it and repeat it to your cronies wherever you may meet them. Tell them that I expect to stay for a considerable time in this town. I expect to become well acquainted with Munson and the neighborhood around it. And I expect to live here in peace. When I say peace, I mean it. I intend to rent a house and to live quietly in it on the edge of town. I do not wish to have my sleep disturbed at night. And, if there is a noisy riot, I shall come out and put an end to the good time if I can. If a stray bullet from a brawl happens to find its way through my window, you may trust that I shall find the man who fired it. Beyond this, I wish to say that I desire to have my name handled gently. If there is any vicious talk, I want you to know that I possess an exceedingly sensitive nature, and I shall find the vicious talkers, gentlemen, and I shall kill those vicious talkers, gentlemen, if I am able. I am well aware that there is no law in Munson, at the present moment. And I hereby give notice that my own laws I shall enforce with a gun. And now, gentlemen, I want you to understand, finally, that I quite sympathize with the error into which you have fallen concerning me. To you, I looked rather soft. If you have found that I am not soft, and if you desire to be my friends, come back with me into the saloon and have a drink at my expense.”

  Not a man held back. They were afraid to, perhaps. Or perhaps there were so many of them that they were not ashamed. Because crowds are usually devoid of all noble feeling—even of shame. They went back with the tall man, and he went behind the bar and served them, stepping over the body of the dead man that lay on the floor, while he passed out glasses and bottles. He drank with them most cheerfully, and they noted that he put down the red-eye without blinking an eye and without a chaser. They noticed, too, that he paid punctually for the drinks, leaving a bright new gold piece shining upon the bar as he passed out.

  The crowd remained behind to chat about this new wonder, to lift the body of Mortimer and give him a dog’s burial just as he had died a dog’s death.

  In the street the tall man met the little tenderfoot. He smiled down at little Sammy Gregg and he found the steady, unshaken, pale-blue eye of Sammy Gregg surveying him gravely.

  “Does a man have to be like you to get on in this part of the country?” asked Sammy.

  “Not a bit,” said Furness, “but it’s a good thing to be able to take care of yourself. Have you a gun?”

  “I never fired a gun in my life.”

  “There’s a store. You’d better go buy one, the first thing you do.”

  Sammy Gregg shook his head. “I’m no good at a bluff,” he said. “If I wear a gun, it’s a sign that I pretend that I can use it. But I can’t. And I never could afford the time to learn. I’m pressed for time, you see.”

  The tall man did not smile. He began to regard the little man more seriously. “May I ask what your business is?” he said.

  “I have no business,” said Sammy, “except to make ten thousand dollars in six months out here. Do you think it can be done?”

  “That depends,” Furness replied.

  “Honestly, I mean.”

  “Ah,” said Furness, “that is another story. No . . . frankly I’m afraid that you can’t.”

  The ferret gleam of eagerness came into the eyes of little Sammy Gregg. “I think that I will, though,” he declared.

  “Finding a gold mine, then?”

  “No, I don’t know what I’ll find. All I want is an opportunity . . . not a gold mine. And fellows like those”—he gestured toward the bullet-cracked door of the saloon—“are liable to leave a whole lot of opportunities lying around loose without anybody really claiming them.” He added: “I ought to thank you, though, for getting me out of that mess.”

  “Don’t say a word about it,” the big man said genially. “I was fighting my own battle, and not yours. Affairs have come to such a horrible point around here that a man has to take a killing on his hands whenever he enters a new town . . . or very nearly that.”

  He said this in rather a jesting tone, but still there was something in his manner that made little Sammy open his eyes, and he thought he knew now what he had only guessed in the barroom—that Furness was the veteran of a hundred hand-to-hand encounters. And awe and dread filled Sammy, and, with it, a certain instinctive dislike.

  Others were to feel that same dislike for Furness later on, but Sammy was the first man to sense the danger and the evil in the big fellow. He said good bye rather briskly and swung away down the street.

  Opportunity: really and truly to turn $5,000 into $15,000 in six months.

  But one could not examine such country as this on foot. And there must be horse and saddle procured at once. He went to the store for the saddle and got a second-hand one, a badly worn and tattered one.

  “It won’t give you none too comfortable a seat,” the storekeeper advised him frankly.

  “I’m not looking for comfort,” Sammy Gregg said. “Now, where can I get a horse and what do I have to pay for it? I hear they have ten-dollar horses out West?”

  “Texas is what you mean,” the storekeeper said. “But around here they gobble up everything in the shape of a horse for fifty dollars. And up at the Crumbock mines they’ll pay seventy-five.”

  Chapter Four

  That was enough for young Sammy Gregg. He was looking for an opportunity and here, it seemed, was one shoved under his very nose.

  Horses cost $10 in Texas—in Crumbock they cost $75. The difference would be $65 in clear profit. Allow $15 a head for transportation, and the profit was still $50 a head. Very well. For the sake of caution, suppose that he invested only half of his available capital and turned $2,500 into horses. That would give him two-hundred-and-fifty head at $10 a head. But fifty times two hundred and fifty was $12,500! That was $2,500 more than the profit he needed and already at hand.

  Fire began to burn in Sammy Gregg, but he masked it carefully from his face. “I should think,” he said, “that a lot of people would be in the business of buying Texas horses and selling them in the Crumbock mining region.”

  “You would think that,” the storekeeper said, nodding, “unless you knowed.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Knowed what Texas mustangs is like, for one thing.”

  “Well?”

  The storekeeper closed his eyes in strained thought as he reached for a superlative. “Keeping hold of a herd of mustangs,” he said at last, “is like trying to keep hold of a handful of quicksilver. The harder you try to hold it, the farther it spurts away.”

  “They’re wild, I suppose.”

  “You suppose, son, but I know. I’ve rode ’em . . . I’ve broke ’em . . . and then they broke me!”

  “Really?”

  “I got a hip smashed as flat as a pancake. That’s one thi
ng. My ribs is mixed up worsen a mess of eggs scrambled in a frying pan. And my head is set on crooked. All from mixing too long with them mustangs.”

  “But if one just herds them along . . . ?”

  “Herded the devil!” said the storekeeper with a weary sigh. “I herded six of them twenty miles, once. It took me a month.”

  “A month!”

  “And then I only delivered seven of the twenty.”

  “Good heavens!” Sammy Gregg gasped. “Did you lose the way?”

  The storekeeper stared at him. “Lose my way traveling twenty miles? Son, I ain’t that kind of a fool. Not me. I pack a sort of a compass in the back of my head. But lemme tell you about a mustang . . . that everything that you want to do is just what the mustang ain’t got any idea of doing.”

  Sammy was amazed.

  “They stampede,” said the storekeeper, “from hell to breakfast and back ag’in. That’s their nature. Promiscuous and free and easy. Where they want to be is always just over the edge of the sky away from where you want ’em to be. You can write that down. Besides, even if a herd was drove up here by good horse hands . . . like some of them Mexicans are . . . still what chance would there be of it getting safe to Crumbock?”

  “I can’t see why not.”

  “You’re young, son, but I’ll make you a little older in a minute. Lemme tell you that this ain’t no open level plain around here.”

  “I can see that,” Sammy commented seriously.

  “It’s all gouged up and criss-crossed by gullies and cañons every which way, ain’t it?”