face. "I ask you to take back what you have just said. I do not warn
you. If you do so, there is no quarrel between us. I merely ask you to
take it back."

He halted expectant; but there was no answer, Craig's lips were
twitching uncontrollably, but he did not speak.

Just perceptibly the Indian shifted forward in his seat, just
perceptibly the long brown fingers tightened on his pony's mane.

"Will you not take it back?" he asked.

Once more the white man's lip twitched. "No," he said.

"No?"

"No."

That was all--and it was not all. For an instant after the Easterner had
spoken the stars looked down on the two men as they were, face to face;
then smiling, satiric they gazed down upon a very different scene: one
as old and as new as the history of man. Just what happened in that
moment that intervened neither the white man nor the red could have
told. It was a lapse, an oblivion; a period of primitive physical
dominance, of primitive human hate. When they awoke--when the red man
awoke--they were flat on earth, the dust of the prairie in their
nostrils, the short catch of their breath in each other's ears, out one,
the dark-skinned, was above. One, again the dark-skinned, had his
fingers locked tight on the other's throat. This they knew when they
awoke.