"Why don't I?" He clumped the length of the tiny storeroom and back
again; one crippled leg all but dragging. "Why don't I?" repeated for
the third time. "Do you imagine for the fraction of a second, Walt
Wagner, that if I was back twenty years and sound like you are, I'd be
asking another man why he didn't do the job?" Terrible, almost ghastly,
he stood there before them, the picture of bitter rage, of impotent,
distorted senility. "Have you got the last spark of manhood left in you,
and ask that question of me?"

In the pockets of his trousers Wagner's hands worked nervously. His face
went red again, but he gave no answer. Bud Smith it was, Bud Smith,
five-feet-two, with a complexion prairie wind had made like a lobster
display in a cafe window, who had halted at the door, but who now came
back, he it was who spoke.

"And while you're in the talkin' business," he suggested slowly, "you
might elab'rate what you meant a bit ago by intimatin' that I had cold
feet. We'll listen to that, too, any time you see fit to explain,
pardner."

"You want to know, do you?" Wagner's countenance had become normal
again, and with an effort at nonchalance he leaned his elbows back
against the glass showcase, glancing the while down at the small man,
almost patronisingly. "Well, then, for your benefit, I was merely
observing that you filled the bill of what dad here said a bit ago we
all were." He smiled tantalisingly; again showing the vacancy in his
dental arch. "You remember what that was, don't you?"

"P'raps and p'raps not," still deliberately. "I ain't lookin' fer
trouble, mind you, but I just like to have things explicit. To be dead