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 into the street, at the end of the bar farthest from the table where Coburn and his men stood. Simpson bobbed up with Wallace's gun out of the scramble of feet and legs which had tried to defeat his intention. He returned it to Wallace, then faced round to the tall bony humorist who had pinned the badge on Wallace's ear.

"If you'll put up that gun I'll trim you!" Simpson proposed. He was bristling with indignation over the affront that had been put upon his friend.

Wallace had the badge off, handkerchief to his bleeding ear, but the boss had taken possession of his gun. Wallace came boring in, reckless in his fury, wild-eyed and frothing.

"Let me at him—damn his gun!" he said.

The boss jumped out and grabbed him, cinching him with his long arms, holding him in spite of his earnest and valiant struggles to rush up against the long man's gun.

Tom Simpson stood looking the fellow through and through, plenty of floor space around them for whatever operations his contemptuous challenge might set going.

"You're a rotten damned coward!" said Simpson. "You're a dirty sneak!"

The challenged man raised his long black pistol and wavered the muzzle of it back and forth before Simpson's face, not four inches from his nose.

"Smell that! It'll clabber your blood," he said.

Simpson was about a foot shorter than the fellow, but Sid Coburn saw in the way Tom gathered himself that he was getting ready to climb him like a tree, gun or no gun. Eddie Kane was struck with the same intelligence at