Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/269

 Just once did the deepset and malicious little eyes shift in one sidelong glance of hesitancy. McKinnon, from his cabin door, could see that look. He could see the change of colour that crept slowly up through the gun-runner's flaccid face. It did not blanch, but it merged from a brick-dust tint to the dead-brown hue of untanned leather. It became cadaverous, and horrible to look at. Even then he must have seen and known that it was all madness, that it was more than useless, that it solved no problems and settled no issues. But he had no choice left to him.

McKinnon's first thought, as he watched, was that Ganley would never fight fair. Then he beheld the close-packed circle of rough and waiting faces, of bare-armed and hard-eyed watchers—for even the stokers' hole had vomited forth its soot-streaked, naked-shouldered children of wonder—and he knew that the gun-runner could gain nothing by trickery. The ferine and active brain housed in the great sun-browned skull would be of no use to him in this. The adroit and vulpine intelligence beyond its screening frontal bone could now flash out no path of deliverance. He was confronted by passions that were adamitic in their primitiveness, by forces that belonged to the world of claws and tusks and talons.