As Samson started toward Farbish, the conspirator rose, and, with an
excellent counterfeit of insulted virtue, pushed back his chair.
"By God," he indignantly exclaimed, "you mustn't try to embroil me in
your quarrels. You must apologize. You are talking wildly, South."
"Am I?" questioned the Kentuckian, quietly; "I'm going to act wildly
in a minute."
He halted a short distance from Farbish, and drew from his pocket a
crumpled scrap of the offending magazine page: the item that had
offended Horton.
"I may not have good manners, Mister Farbish, but where I come from we
know how to handle varmints." He dropped his voice and added for the
plotter's ear only: "Here's a little matter on the side that concerns
only us. It wouldn't interest these other gentlemen." He opened his
hand, and added: "Here, eat that!"
Farbish, with a frightened glance at the set face of the man who was
advancing upon him, leaped back, and drew from his pocket a pistol--it
was an exact counterpart of the one with which he had supplied Samson.
With a panther-like swiftness, the Kentuckian leaped forward, and
struck up the weapon, which spat one ineffective bullet into the
rafters. There was a momentary scuffle of swaying bodies and a crash
under which the table groaned amid the shattering of glass and china.
Then, slowly, the conspirator's body bent back at the waist, until its
shoulders were stretched on the disarranged cloth, and the white face,
with purple veins swelling on the forehead, stared up between two brown
hands that gripped its throat.
"Swallow that!" ordered the mountaineer.
For just an instant, the company stood dumfounded, then a strained,
unnatural voice broke the silence.
"Stop him, he's going to kill the man!"
The odds were four to two, and with a sudden rally to the support of
their chief plotter, the other conspirators rushed the figure that
stood throttling his victim. But Samson South was in his element. The
dammed-up wrath that had been smoldering during these last days was
having a tempestuous outlet. He had found men who, in a gentlemen's
club to which he had come as a guest, sought to use him as a catspaw
and murderer.
They had planned to utilize the characteristics upon which they relied
in himself. They had thought that, if once angered, he would relapse
into the feudist, and forget that his surroundings were those of
gentility and civilization. Very well, he would oblige them, but not as
a blind dupe. He would be as elementally primitive as they had pictured
him, but the victims of his savagery should be of his own choosing.
Before his eyes swam a red mist of wrath. Once before, as a boy, he had
seen things as through a fog of blood. It was the day when the factions
met at Hixon, and he had carried the gun of his father for the first
time into action. The only way his eyes could be cleared of that fiery
haze was that they should first see men falling.