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thinking about schoolchildren he cared not a whit about. Far more important to Ian was the opportunity to get rid of the horse guard at the church tomorrow. Besides, with Peyton out of the way, he could drive Gabriella to church, in a springed buggy with a wide, cushioned front seat. He couldn’t think of a more pleasant way to spend a Sunday morning than with a girl who liked his speeches and grew ecstatic over silver dollars, schoolteacher or no.
    Ian’s last musing, drawn out over several microseconds, gave G-7 a clue to more powerful motivational areas in the human psyche. It reacted with whorls of energy around the mating nodules in the man’s brain.
    McCloud had never heard of Lilith or Helen of Troy. For him, Semiramis had never been, and Deirdre was a lie told by an Irishman. Yet, at this moment with Peyton’s hand finally touching the pistol’s handle, he felt all the storied charm of earth’s immortal beauties, all the nuances of love held by romantic legend, focused in an after-image on his brain of a golden-haired waitress. For approximately three one-hundredths of a second, McCloud was in love with Gabriella Stewart.
    He had to take the girl to church tomorrow, but a proper schoolteacher would never permit herself to be escorted by the man who had gunned down her recognized suitor the day before. The problem occurred to Ian simultaneously with its solution. He could make Billy Peyton the laughing stock of Shoshone Flats. He could spare the man but kill his pride.
    It was Ian McCloud’s solution, not G-7’s, but since levity is an attribute of luminosities, the humor in the plan aroused G-7’s admiration.
    Peyton’s revolver had cleared its holster before Ian moved. He flipped out his gun and took careful aim, firing at the index finger protruding from the trigger guard of Peyton’s pistol, leading the upward moving target by a quarter-inch. Ian fired. Watching the slug from his .44 move along its trajectory, Ian knew before it had gone six feet that the bullet was on target. No follow-up shot would be necessary.
    G-7 did not figure the firing angle for its host. With his nerves, viscera, muscles, and keen eyesight, McCloud had done it all himself, and G-7 was proud of the man.
    Ian saw his bullet stride the trigger casing of the Mormon’s gun, sever the first two joints of Peyton’s trigger finger, and ricochet, tumbling to strike sideways against Peyton’s belt buckle. The slow, driving force of the bullet jackknifed Peyton backward along the boardwalk, lifting his boot heels into the air.
    Technically Peyton had never fired the bullet which oozed from the muzzle of his revolver and crawled slowly toward a clump of bushes ten paces between the gunfighters; Ian’s bullet had fired Peyton’s pistol. As Ian watched the .38 slug plummet toward the ground, he made, for him, a strange resolution: He would never tell anyone that his bullet had fired Peyton’s pistol. Without doubt, this was Billy Peyton’s first and only gunfight, and it was fitting that, along with the stub of his trigger finger, the Mormon be left some tattered remnant of his pride.
    As time regained its tempo in the roar of pistols, Ian saw Peyton’s gun swirling away into the dust and Billy sitting on the sidewalk holding a bleeding stub of what had once been his trigger finger in front of him, looking at it in disbelief. He saw Gabriella rushing from the restaurant. Across the road, the swinging doors of Bain’s saloon swung outward, propelling Mr. Bain and four spavined dance hall girls dressed in ball gowns toward the scene. Sheriff Faust was emerging from his office, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Down the street, the door of Near-Sighted Charlie’s Funeral Parlor opened and a sawed-off man groped his way out. All the images impinged but briefly on Ian’s sight as he moved toward his fallen foe, whipping the bandanna from around his neck and twisting it as he advanced.
    “Give me your wrist, lead knuckles,” he said as