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Until now Trencher–to give him the name by which of all the names he used he best was known–had kept his temper in hobbles, no matter what or how great the provocation. As one whose mode of livelihood was trick and device outside the law it had behooved him ever to restrain himself from violent outbreaks, to school and curb and tame his natural tendencies as a horsebreaker might gentle a spirited colt. A man who held his disposition always under control could think faster than any man who permitted his passions to jangle his nerves. Besides, he had the class contempt of the high-grade confidence man–the same being the aristocrat of the underworld–for the crude and violent and therefore doubly dangerous codes of the stick-up, who is a highwayman; and the prowler, who is a burglar; and the yegg, who is a safe blower of sorts.

Until now Trencher had held fast by the self-imposed rules of his self-imposed discipline, and so doing had lived well and lived safe. It was an unfortunate thing all round that this little rat of a Sonntag had crossed him at an hour when he was profoundly irritated by the collapse of their elaborately planned and expensive scheme to divest that Cheyenne cattleman of his bank roll at the wire game. And it was a doubly unfortunate thing for Sonntag seeing that Sonntag had just been shot three times with his own automatic and was now dead or should be.

It was like Sonntag–and most utterly unlike Trencher–to whine over spilt milk and seek to shift the blame for the failure of their plot to any pair of shoulders rather than his own thin pair. And to the very life it was like Sonntag that at the climax of the quarrel he should have made a gun play. As Trencher now realised, it had been his mistake in the first place that he took Sonntag on for a partner in the thwarted operation; but it had been Sonntag’s great, fatal mistake that he had drawn a weapon against a man who could think faster and act faster in emergencies than Sonntag ever had been able to do. Having drawn it Sonntag should have used it. But having drawn it he had hesitated for a space not to be measured in computable time–and that delay had been his undoing.

The gun-pulling episode had taken place in Thirty-ninth Street, between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, but nearer Broadway than Sixth Avenue, at a moment when that block of Thirty-ninth Street was as near empty as ever it gets to be. The meeting in the darkened place, just where the portico at the side entrance of the old Jollity Theatre, extending out across the sidewalk, made a patch of obscurity in the half-lit street, had been a meeting by chance so far as Trencher was concerned. He had not been looking for Sonntag; hadn’t wanted to see Sonntag. Whether Sonntag had been seeking him was something which nobody probably would ever know this side the hereafter.

To the best of Trencher’s belief there had been but one possible eyewitness to the actual shooting. Out of the tail of his eye, just before he and Sonntag came to grips, he had caught a glimpse of this surmisable third party. He had sensed rather than seen that an elderly bearded man, perhaps the watchman of the closed theatre, passed along the sidewalk, going east. It was Trencher’s impression that the man had gone on by without halting. However, on that point he could not be sure. What the onlooker had seen–if indeed there were an onlooker–could have been only this: Two men, one fairly tall and dressed in a sprightly fashion, one short and dark, engaged in a vehement but whispered quarrel there in the cloaking shadow close up to the locked double doors of the Jollity; a sudden hostile move on the part of the slighter man, backing away and reaching for his flank; a quick forward jump by the taller man to close with the other; a short sharp struggle as the pair of them fought for possession of the revolver which the dark man had jerked from his flank pocket; then the tall man, victorious, shoving his antagonist clear of him and stepping back a pace; and on top of this the three sharp reports and the three little spurts of fire bridging the short gap between the sundered enemies like darting red hyphens to punctuate the enacted tragedy.