Page:Morley roberts--Painted Rock.djvu/117

 Briggs had the dead-wood on him and meant killing.

"Oh, he'll be scared right enough," I said.

And the Colonel rode up alongside the verandah coolly enough, though it was so hot.

"Good-day, gentlemen," he said. "Is Mr. Hopkins in?"

He ran his eye over all of us, and I remembered that he didn't know Northrop.

It was Tom who answered. "I guess he's out, Colonel," said Tom. But it was his brother's voice that Briggs heard and his brother's eye that Briggs saw, and the blood ran out of his face and his jaw fell. Things and thoughts moved swiftly enough, but for me the intense moment was magnificently spacious—a thousandth part of a second held concentrated drama. I saw not Tom, but the dead man; I heard him speak.

"I guess he's out, Colonel!"

The words came slowly, and the men who were not in the game felt that there was a game. They had lived where life is living; where the instant may mean death, where comedy laughs tragically; where tragedy