Page:Frank Spearman--Whispering Smith.djvu/393

 For an instant he looked troubled. Still appealing to them with his eyes, he tapped lightly the lower outside pockets of his coat with his fingers, shifting the cigarette paper from hand to hand as he hunted. The outside pockets seemed empty. But as he tapped the inside breast pocket on the left side of the coat—the three men, lynx-eyed, watching—his face brightened. “Stop!” said he, his voice sinking to a relieved whisper as his hand rested lightly on the treasure. “There’s the tobacco. I suppose one of you will give me a match?”

All that the three before him could ever afterward recollect—and for several years afterward they cudgelled their brains pretty thoroughly about that moment—was that Whispering Smith took hold of the left lapel of his coat to take the tobacco out of the breast pocket. An excuse to take that lapel in his left hand was, in fact, all that Whispering Smith needed to put not alone the three men before him but all Oroville at his mercy. The play of his right hand in crossing the corduroy waistcoat to pull his revolver from its scabbard and throw it into their faces was all too quick for better eyes than theirs. They saw only the muzzle of the heavy Colt’s playing like a snake’s tongue under their surprised noses, with the good-natured smile still behind it. “Or will 367