Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/90

 the ground, you shoot! Don't wait for him to start it—you shoot!"

Hall took the pistol, looking at it curiously, as if she had offered some rare thing for his examination.

"No," he said, handing it back, "I think I'd be better off without it. Thank you, just the same."

He swung out of the car door, his long legs being sufficient without the ladder, and struck straight across to his office as if unconscious of both the presence and identity of Old Doc Ross. At the sound of Hall's feet on the cinders, Ross turned, fixing him with malignant, inflamed eyes. There was only the length of Hall's shadow between them, and it was not much longer at that hour of the day than the substance.

Ross did not challenge him; Hall went on to his door. There he stopped, looking at the end of the car as if figuring on the best place to cut a stovepipe hole, or tack up a bill of some kind, or even hang a doctor's sign. There was a movement of heels in the cinders behind him. Hall turned.

"Are you the splay-footed reptile from the slime of hades that calls himself a doctor?" Old Doc Ross inquired, his voice rough and uncertain as if he spoke out of the fog of a heavy sleep.

"I not only call myself a doctor, but I am a doctor," Hall replied calmly. "But my ticket didn't read from the place you mention, if that's what you want to know."

"Don't try to get smart with me, you half-boiled squab, or by the gods I'll cut the heart out of you, by the gods!"

Ross parted the skirts of his long coat to show the handle of a sheathed knife on one hand, the butt of a gun on the other.