Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/367

Rh this. "I learned to know what fear was," he says. Often at night he would give up. "If he calls me that to-morrow, I'll shoot," he would decide. But, fresher in the morning, he would go out and when the Doctor, with McClarty or Hank Hewitt up beside him, would meet him and escort him from his home to his office, taunting him as a coward to shoot, Heney would sweat and take it.

For the year and a half that the trial dragged along, this continued and meanwhile Handy refused to give his wife money. She lived on what Heney lent her. And she also was made to suffer.

Well, a divorce was decreed and Handy got the children. But that did not end it. Heney appealed. Handy sent word to him to abandon the appeal or leave the territory, and all Heney's friends told him that the Doctor was more desperate than ever. But Heney felt free to shoot now. "I believe," he says, "that Handy had come to think that I was what he had called me, a coward. He was more afraid of Ben than he was of me." The crisis came when Frank returned alone from San Francisco whither he and Ben had gone together.

The day Frank got back, Handy followed him up into a real estate office. He came on the run, but after him came a deputy sheriff named Perrin, who seized the Doctor and warned him away.

But the next day, as Heney and his clerk left their office at noon. Handy appeared walking down the opposite side of the street, "Hold up," said Heney to his clerk, "there's Handy. Let's stand here and talk." Handy crossed the street and brushed past Heney's back, jostled him, stopped, and called him a name, that same old fighting name. Heney turned, and as he did so, Handy hit him in the face, seized him by the throat and jammed him against the wall. Heney reached for his gun, but he did not draw it; he saw Handy look down, watching for it. Remembering what Handy had said so often about killing him with his own gun, Heney showed both his hands, unarmed, and then, feeling Handy's grip relax on his throat, he ducked, ran backward out into the street and drew. Handy, following him, put his hand back for his own gun, but he stuck to his fixed idea; he jumped at Heney and grabbed his revolver with both hands. And just as he clutched it, Heney fired.

The bullet went tearing down diagonally through Handy's intestines. A look of amazement passed over his face, then one of murderous resolve settled there and the real struggle began. Handy weighed 200 pounds, Heney only 126, and the bigger man had counted always on his physical superiority. That his faith in his strength was well founded he showed now. For, after he was shot, he fought in the street for three or four minutes. Many witnesses saw it, and they all testify that, as the two clung to that revolver, the wounded man lifted Heney off his feet, swung him round and round, and time and time again bore him to his knees. Heney's agility saved him, that and the crowd, which finally dragged the fighters apart. And then Handy walked a block and a half to his office, lay there till he could be taken home, and did not die till next day!

When Heney went after the timber thieves of Oregon and again when he began his investigation into the "Labor" government of San Francisco, the grafters sent agents to Arizona to search his record, and they tried hard to make something out of his killing of Dr. Handy. It was no use. The hearings at the time were thorough; Heney saw to that. There were many witnesses; they all were heard, and Heney was not only discharged, he was vindicated with a triumph by "good men and true" chosen from a community which had very generally declared that it would have "given Handy both barrels long ago." All men felt, and many had said that Heney should not have taken what he did from Handy,