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If it hadn’t been for Cardwell, Owen knew that he could have convinced Rip Yust of his own innocence. But he saw the dead man again whenever he saw one of the Yusts; and this afternoon, when Rip had come into his cabin and hurled that accusing “They got Lucky this morning” across the table, Cardwell had filled Owen Sack’s mind to the exclusion of all else — filled it with a fear that had made him talk and act as if he had in fact guided the Prohibition enforcement officers to the Yusts’ cache. And so Yust had gone away more than half convinced that his suspicions were correct.

Rip Yust was, Owen Sack knew, a fair man according to his lights. He would do nothing until he was certain that he had the right man. Then he would strike with neither warning nor mercy.

An eye for an eye was the code of the Rip Yusts of the world, and an enemy was one to be removed without scruple. And that Yust would not strike until he had satisfied himself that he had the right man was small comfort to Owen Sack.

Yust was not possessed of the clearest of minds; he was not fitted, for all his patience and deliberation, to unerringly sift the false from the true. Many things that properly were meaningless might, to him, seem irrefragable evidence of Owen Sack’s guilt — now that Owen Sack’s fears had made him act the part of a witness against himself.

And some morning Owen Sack’s body would be found as Cardwell’s had been found. Perhaps Cardwell had been unjustly suspected too.

Owen Sack sat up straight now, squaring his shoulders and tightening his mouth in another half-hearted attempt to pull himself together. He ground his fists into his temples, and for a moment pretended to himself that he was trying to arrive at a decision, to map out a course of action. But in his heart he knew all the time that he was lying to himself. He was going to run away again. He always did. The time for making a stand was gone.

Thirty years ago he might have done it.

That time in a Marsh Market Space dive in Baltimore, when a dispute over a reading of the dice had left him facing a bull-dog pistol in the hands of a cockney sailor. The cockney’s hand had shaken; they had stood close together; the cockney was as frightened as he. A snatch, a blow — it would have been no trick at all. But he had, after a moment’s hesitancy, submitted; he had let the cockney not only run him out of the game but out of the city.

His fear of ballets had been too strong for him. He wasn’t a coward (not then); a knife, which most men dread, hadn’t seemed especially fearful in those days. It travelled at a calculable and discernible rate of speed; you could see it coming; judge its speed; parry, elude it; or twist about so that its wound was shallow. And even if it struck, went deep, it was sharp and slid easily through the flesh, a clean, neat separation of the tissues.

But a bullet, a ball of metal, hot from the gases that propelled it, hurtling invisibly toward you — nobody could say how fast — not to make a path for itself with a fine keen edge, but to hammer out a road with a dull blunt nose, driving through whatever stood in its way. A lump of hot lead battering its irresistible tunnel through flesh and sinew, splintering bones! That he could not face.

So he had fled from the Maryland city to avoid the possibility of another meeting with the cockney sailor and his bull-dog pistol.

And that was only the first time.

No matter where he had gone, he had sooner or later found himself looking into the muzzle of a threatening gun. It was as if his very fear attracted the thing he feared. A dog, he had been told as a boy, would bite you if he thought you were afraid of him. It had been that way with guns.