"It looks kind of that way."
"Yeah, it kind of does, don't it?"
At four that afternoon Buck Tarrant came riding into town like he
owned it. He sat his battered old saddle like a rajah on an elephant,
and he held his right hand low beside his hip in an exaggerated
gunman's stance. With his floppy hat over at a cocky angle, and his
big eyes and scrawny frame, he'd have looked funny as hell trying to
look like a tough hombre--except that he _was_ tough now, and
everybody in town knew it because I'd warned them. Otherwise somebody
might have jibed him, and the way things were now, that could lead to
a sudden grave.
Nobody said a word all along the street as he rode to the hitchrail in
front of the Once Again and dismounted. There wasn't many people
around _to_ say anything--most everybody was inside, and all you could
see of them was a shadow of movement behind a window there, the
flutter of a curtain there.
Only a few men sat in chairs along the boardwalks under the porches,
or leaned against the porchposts, and they just sort of stared around,
looking at Buck for a second and then looking off again if he turned
toward them.
I was standing near to where Buck hitched up. He swaggered up the
steps of the saloon, his right hand poised, his bulging eyes full of
hell.
"You tell him?" he asked.