THE GLASS BUTTON
Even as the big fellow stepped lightly just inside and to the left--as
de Spain stood--of the door and faced him, the encounter seemed to de
Spain accidental. While Sandusky was not a man he would have chosen to
meet at that time, he did not at first consider the incident an
eventful one. But before he could speak, a second man appeared in the
doorway, and this man appeared to be joking with a third, behind him.
As the second man crossed the threshold, de Spain saw Sandusky's
high-voiced little fighting crony, Logan, who now made way, as he
stepped within to the right of the open door, for the swinging
shoulders and rolling stride of Gale Morgan.
Morgan, eying de Spain with insolence, as was his wont, closed the
door behind him with a bang. Then he backed his powerful frame
significantly against it.
A blind man could have seen the completeness of the snare. An
unpleasant feeling flashed across de Spain's perception. It was only
for the immeasurable part of a second--while uncertainty was
resolving itself into a rapid certainty. When Gale Morgan stepped into
the room on the heels of his two Calabasas friends, de Spain would
have sold for less than a cup of coffee all his chances for life.
Nevertheless, before Morgan had set his back fairly against the door
and the trap was sprung, de Spain had mapped his fight, and had
already felt that, although he might not be the fortunate man, not
more than one of the four within the room would be likely to leave it
alive.
He did not retreat from where he halted at the instant Sandusky
entered. His one slender chance was to hug to the men that meant to
kill him. Morgan, the nearest, he esteemed the least dangerous of the
three; but to think to escape both Sandusky and Logan at close
quarters was, he knew, more than ought to be hoped for.
While Morgan was closing the door, de Spain smiled at his visitors:
"That isn't necessary, Morgan: I'm not ready to run." Morgan only
continued to stare at him. "I need hardly ask," added de Spain,
"whether you fellows have business with me?"
He looked to Sandusky for a reply; it was Logan who answered in shrill
falsetto: "No. We don't happen to have business that I know of. A
friend of ours may have a little, maybe!" Logan, lifting his
shoulders with his laugh, looked toward his companions for an answer
to his joke.
De Spain's smile appeared unruffled: "You'll help him transact it, I
suppose?"
Logan, looking again toward Sandusky, grinned: "He won't need any
help."
"Who is your friend?" demanded de Spain good-naturedly. Logan's glance
misled him; it did not refer to Sandusky. And even as he asked the
question de Spain heard through the half-open window at the end of the
bar the sound of hoofs. Hoping against hope for Lefever, the
interruption cheered him. It certainly did not seem that his situation
could be made worse.
"Well," answered Logan, talking again to his gallery of cronies,
"we've got two or three friends that want to see you. They're waiting
outside to see what you'll look like in about five minutes--ain't
they, Gale?"
Some one was moving within the rear room. De Spain felt hope in every
footfall he heard, and the mention this time of Morgan's name cleared
his plan of battle. Before Gale, with an oath, could blurt out his
answer, de Spain had resolved to fight where he stood, taking Logan
first and Morgan as he should jump in between the two. It was at the
best a hopeless venture against Sandusky's first shot, which de Spain
knew was almost sure to reach a vital spot. But desperate men cannot
be choosers.
"There's no time for seeing me like the present," declared de Spain,
ignoring Morgan and addressing his words to Logan. "Bring your friends
in. What are you complaining about, Morgan?" he asked, resenting the
stream of abuse that Gale hurled at him whenever he could get a word
in. "I had my turn at you with a rifle the other day. You've got your
turn now. And I call it a pretty soft one, too--don't you, Sandusky?"
he demanded suddenly of the big fellow.
Sandusky alone through the talk had kept an unbroken silence. He was
eating up de Spain with his eyes, and de Spain not only ached to hear
him speak but was resolved to make him. Sandusky had stood motionless
from the instant he entered the room. He knew all about the
preliminary gabble of a fight and took no interest in it. He did _not_
know all about de Spain, and being about to face his bullets he had
prudence enough to wonder whether the man could have brought a
reputation to Sleepy Cat without having done something to earn it.
What Sandusky was sensibly intent on was the determination that he
should not contribute personally to the further upbuilding of
anybody's reputation. His eyes with this resolve shining in them
rested intently on de Spain, and at his side the long fingers of his
right hand beat a soft tattoo against his pistol holster. De Spain's
question seemed to arouse him. "What's your name?" he demanded
bluntly. His voice was heavy and his deafness was reflected in the
strained tone.
"It's on the butt of my gun, Sandusky."
"What's that he says?" demanded the man known as the butcher, asking
the question of Logan, but without taking his eyes off his shifty
prey.
Logan raised his voice to repeat the words and to add a ribald
comment.
"You make a good deal of noise," muttered Sandusky, speaking again to
de Spain.
"That ought not to bother you much, Sandusky," shouted de Spain,
trying to win a smile from his taciturn antagonist.
"His noise won't bother anybody much longer," put in Logan, whose
retorts overflowed at every interval. But there was no smile even
hinted at in the uncompromising vigilance of Sandusky's expressionless
face. De Spain discounted the next few minutes far enough to feel that
Sandusky's first shot would mean death to him, even if he could return
it.
"I'll tell you, de Spain," continued Logan, "we're going to have a
drink with you. Then we're going to prepare you for going back where
you come from--with nice flowers."
"I guess you thought you could come out here and run over everybody in
the Spanish Sinks," interposed Morgan, with every oath he could summon
to load his words.
"Keep out, Morgan," exclaimed Logan testily. "I'll do this talking."
De Spain continued to banter. "Gentlemen," he said, addressing the
three together and realizing that every moment wasted before the
shooting added a grain of hope, "I am ready to drink when you are."
"He's ready to drink, Tom," roared Morgan in the deaf man's ear.
"I'm ready," announced Sandusky in hollow voice.
Still regarding de Spain with the most businesslike expression, the
grizzled outlaw took a guarded step forward, his companions following
suit. De Spain, always with a jealous regard for the relative distance
between him and his self-appointed executioners, moved backward. In
crossing the room, Sandusky, without objection from his companions,
moved across their front, and when the four lined up at the bar their
positions had changed. De Spain stood at the extreme left, Sandusky
next, Logan beside him, and Gale Morgan, at the other end of the line,
pretended to pound the bar for service. De Spain, following mountain
etiquette in the circumstances, spread his open hands, palms down, on
the bar. Sandusky's great palms slid in the same fashion over the
checked slab in unspoken recognition of the brief armistice. Logan's
hands came up in turn, and Morgan still pounded for some one to
serve.
De Spain in the new disposition weighed his chances as being both
better and worse. They had put Sandusky's first shot at no more than
an arm's length from his prey, with Logan next to cover the
possibility of the big fellow's failing to paralyze de Spain the first
instant. On the other hand, de Spain, trained in the tactics of
Whispering Smith and Medicine Bend gunmen, welcomed a short-arm
struggle with the worst of his assailants closest at hand. One factor,
too, that he realized they were reckoning with, gave him no concern.
No men in the mountains understood better or were more expert in the
technicalities of the law of self-defense than the gunmen of
Calabasas. The killing of de Spain they well knew would, in spite of
everything, raise a hornet's nest in Sleepy Cat, and they wished to be
prepared for it. Their manoeuvring on this score caused no disquiet
to their slender, compactly built victim. "You'll wait a long time, if
you wait for service here, Morgan," he said, commenting with composure
on Morgan's impatience. Logan looked again at his two companions and
laughed.
Every hope de Spain had of possible help from the back room died with
that laugh. Then the door behind the bar slowly opened, and the
scar-featured face of Sassoon peered cautiously from the gloom. The
horse thief, stooping, walked in with a leer directed triumphantly at
the railroad man.
If it were possible to deepen it, the sinister spot on de Spain's face
darkened. Something in his blood raged at the sight of the malevolent
face. He glanced at Logan. "This," he smiled faintly, nodding toward
Sassoon as he himself took a short step farther to the left, "is your
drink, Harvey, is it?"
"No," retorted Logan loudly, "this is _your_ drink."
"I'll take Sassoon," assented de Spain, good-natured again and
shifting still another step to the left. "What do you fellows want
now?"
"We want to punch a hole through that strawberry," said Logan, "that
beauty-mark. Where did you get it, de Spain?"
"I might as well ask where you get your gall, Harvey," returned de
Spain, watching Logan hunch Sandusky toward the left that both might
crowd him closer. "I was born with my beauty-mark--just as you were
born with your damned bad manners," he added composedly, for in
hugging up to him his enemies were playing his game. "You can't help
it, neither can I," he went on. "Somebody is bound to pay for putting
that mark on me. Somebody is bound to pay for your manners. Why talk
about either? Sassoon, set out for your friends--or I will. Spread,
gentlemen, spread."
He had reached the position on which he believed his life depended,
and stood so close to the end of the bar that with a single step, as
he uttered the last words, he turned it. Sandusky pushed close next
him. De Spain continued to speak without hesitation or break, but the
words seemed to have no place in his mind. He was thinking only, and
saw only within his field of vision, a cut-glass button that fastened
the bottom of Sandusky's greased waistcoat.
"You've waited one day too long to collect for your strawberry, de
Spain," cried Logan shrilly. "You've turned one trick too many on the
Sinks, young fellow. If the man that put your mark on you ain't in
this room, you'll never get him."
"Which means, I take it, you're going to try to get me," smiled de
Spain.
"No," bellowed Morgan, "it means we have got you."
"You are fooling yourself, Harvey." De Spain addressed the warning to
Logan. "And you, too, Sandusky," he added.
"We'll take care of that," grinned Logan. Sandusky kept silence.
"You are jumping into another man's fight," protested de Spain
steadily.
"Sassoon's fight is our fight," interrupted Morgan.
"I advise you," said de Spain once more, looking with the words at
Sandusky and his crony, "to keep out of it."
"Sandusky," yelled Logan to his partner, "he advises me and you to
keep out of this fight," he shrilly laughed.
"Sure," assented Sandusky, but with no variation in tone and his eyes
on de Spain.
Logan, with an oath, leaned over the bar toward Sassoon, and pointed
contemptuously toward the end of the bar. "Shike!" he cried, "step
through the rail and take that man's gun."
De Spain, looking from one to the other of the four faces confronting
him, laughed for the first time. But he was looking without seeing
what he seemed to look at. In reality, he saw only a cut-glass
button. He was face to face with taking a man's life or surrendering
his own, and he knew the life must be taken in such a way as instantly
to disable its possessor. These men had chosen their time and place.
There was nothing for it but to meet them. Sassoon was stepping toward
him, though very doubtfully. De Spain laughed again, dryly this time.
"Go slow, Sassoon," he said. "That gun is loaded."
"If you want terms, hand over your gun to Sassoon," cried Logan.
"Not till it's empty," returned de Spain. "Do you want to try taking
it?" he demanded of Logan, his cheeks burning a little darker.
[Illustration: Hugging his shield, de Spain threw his second shot over
Sandusky's left shoulder.]
Logan never answered the question. It was not meant to be answered.
For de Spain asked it only to cover the spring he made at that instant
into Sandusky's middle. Catlike though it was, the feint did not take
the big fellow unprepared. He had heard once, when or where he could
not tell, but he had never forgotten the hint, that de Spain, a boxer,
was as quick with his feet as with his hands. The outlaw whirled. Both
men shot from the hip; the reports cracked together. One bullet
grazing the fancy button smashed through the gaudy waistcoat: the
other, as de Spain's free hand struck at the muzzle of the big man's
gun, tore into de Spain's foot. Sandusky, convulsed by the frightful
shock, staggered against de Spain's arm, the latter dancing tight
against him. Logan, alive to the trick but caught behind his partner,
fired over Sandusky's right shoulder at de Spain's head, flattened
sidewise against the gasping outlaw's breast. Hugging his shield, de
Spain threw his second shot over Sandusky's left shoulder into Logan's
face. Logan, sinking to the floor, never moved again. Supporting with
extraordinary strength the unwieldy bulk of the dying butcher, de
Spain managed to steady him as a buffer against Morgan's fire until he
could send a slug over Sandusky's head at the instant the latter
collapsed. Morgan fell against the bar.
Sandusky's weight dragged de Spain down. For an instant the four men
sprawled in a heap. Sassoon, who had not yet got an effective shot
across at his agile enemy, dropping his revolver, dodged under the
rail to close. De Spain, struggling to free himself from the dying
man, saw, through a mist, the greenish eyes and the thirsty knife. He
fired from the floor. The bullet shook without stopping his enemy, and
de Spain, partly caught under Sandusky's body, thought, as Sassoon
came on, the game was up. With an effort born of desperation, he
dragged himself from under the twitching giant, freed his revolver,
rolled away, and, with his sight swimming, swung the gun at Sassoon's
stomach. He meant to kill him. The bullet whirled the white-faced man
to one side and he dropped, but pulled himself, full of fight, to his
knees and, knife in hand, panted forward. De Spain rolling hastily
from him, staggered to his feet and, running in as Sassoon tried to
strike, beat him senseless with the butt of his gun.
His own eyes were streaming blood. His head was reeling and he was
breathless, but he remembered those of the gang waiting outside. He
still could see dimly the window at the end of the bar. Dashing his
fingers through the red stream on his forehead, he ran for the window,
smashed through the sash into the patio and found Sassoon's horse
trembling at the fusillade. Catching the lines and the pommel, he
stuck his foot up again and again for the stirrup. It was useless; he
could not make it. Then, summoning all of his fast-ebbing strength, he
threw himself like a sack across the horse's back, lashed the brute
through the open gateway, climbed into the saddle, and spurred blindly
away.