Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/187

 Hall stood lifting himself to his toes; lifting and lowering, lifting and lowering, like a duck preening itself on a sunny bank. There was no other sign of mental turmoil about him; his face was calm, and expressive of the self-confidence which his defiance implied. He seemed merely to be working off an excess of spirits in the rapid levitation, the cinders making a grinding noise under the soles of his brightly polished shoes.

Burnett put his hand in his pocket, drew out his diamonds and began winnowing them from palm to palm, his face flushed, the nonchalance he attempted only a bluff.

"Oh, hell!" he said, in the sneering discount of a man who has no answer in an argument. It is the small person's last shot, into which he compresses his declaration of fatuity in contending against a fool. To such a man or woman, the person who disagrees is always wrong.

"First, you people in this town side-step a murder and hang it on to me. You can't crack a man on the head when his hands are tied and get away with it under any easier name, I tell you, Burnett. And you slinking cowards in this little outcast burg swore it off on me. That was your first offense."

"You'd better go easy on that line of talk, Hall," Burnett advised.

"Next, you set Old Doc Ross on me, hoping to see him chase me down the track a mile or two. Poor old soak, he thought he was putting on the big show for the bums and four-flushers of this town."

Burnett's pink face lost its color. He put his spoonful of diamonds in his pocket, his mouth shut tight as if he compressed it on something better left unsaid. He looked