almost exultingly, he was dragging the _dénouement_ on and on. "That's
what you mean to imply, is it?"

"You've guessed it, Pete." Not a muscle in the small man's body
twitched; there was not the slightest alteration of the even tone.
There, facing death as surely as harvest follows seedtime, knowing as he
knew that but one man present could interfere to prevent, that that man
wouldn't, he spoke those four words: "You've guessed it, Pete." And but
minutes before Manning had called this man coward!

For a moment likewise Sweeney did not stir. For a second his slow brain
failed to grasp the truth, the deliberate challenge of the refusal;
then of a sudden, in a blinding, maddening flood, came comprehension,
came action. Swifter than any human being would have thought possible,
unbelievably ferocious even in this land of licence, something took
place, something which the staring onlookers did not realise until it
was done. They only knew that with a mighty backward leap the cowman had
reached the single heavy oak door, had sent it shut with a bang. That at
the same time there was the vicious spit of a great revolver, that the
odour of burnt gunpowder was in their nostrils, that lifting slowly
toward the ceiling was a cloud of thin blue smoke; a curtain that once
raised made them shudder, made their blood run cold, for it revealed
there, stretched on the floor, huddled as it had dropped, lifeless,
motionless, the figure of the man who had refused, the weazened face of
Land Man Bud Smith! All this they realised in that first second; then
something that was almost fascination drew away their eyes to the man
who had done this deed, to the man who, his back to the great door, the
only means of egress, was covering them, every soul, with the two great
revolvers in his hands. For Pete Sweeney was not drunk now. As swiftly
as that horrible thing had been done he had gone sober. Yet no man who