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agreed. “But I figured maybe you’d want to. You got a choice of doin’ this or something else, and I got a notion you’d be happier doing this.”
    McBride hesitated, seeking some means of equivocation and finding none. At last, he said curtly, “All right. We signed our agreement approximately a year ago. Now, you’re wondering when we’re going to drill on the seventy-five per cent of the lease land owned by you.”
    Lord nodded. “Can’t blame me for that, can you? seein’ that you’ve sunk more than fifty wells on your twenty-five per cent.”
    “The answer is that I don’t know.”
    “No idea, huh? You’re the field boss. You’ve got to plan a long ways ahead, keep all your rigs and men working with no lost motion. But you got no notion of when you’ll drill on my property.”
    McBride’s mouth tightened doggedly. He said nothing.
    “The fact is,” Lord said, “you won’t be puttin’ down no wells at all on my seventy-five per cent. That’s about the size of things, ain’t it? There won’t be nothin’ but offset wells, taking all the oil for Highlands and givin’ me nothing.”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “But you know it’s true. You knew it right in the beginning. Now, I’m asking you to make it square with me.”
    “I—How do you mean?”
    “Go before a judge with me. Just tell what you know—what you got to know. That the contract was made in bad faith with intent to defraud.”
    “But I—” McBride hesitated, swallowed heavily. Then, he continued in flat, dull tones, seeming to recite from some carefully memorized lesson in a distasteful subject. “You had a lawyer,” he said. “The contract was entirely legal. It was not my job to interpret its contents.”
    Lord gave him a long, thoughtful look. Slowly he took out a cigar and lighted it. “This legal stuff,” he said. “I always felt it was meant to protect people. Might go astray now and then; ain’t perfect no more than the people that use it. But if it did, you could pick it up again an’ pry things back on the track. That’s what I was askin’ you to do…”
    He waited, taking another puff from the cigar. McBride was silent, his hands clutching the steering wheel tightly, his eyes fixed straight ahead.
    “Been a lot of people like you around,” Lord went on, “right from the beginning of history. Burnin’ and torturin’ and killing—slappin’ other people into the gas ovens. And it’s always done legal, y’know. They always got a law to back ’em up. If there ain’t one on the books, someone’ll think one up in a hurry. Anyways, they’re just followin’ orders, ain’t they? It’s no skin off their nose if—”
    “Mr. Lord!” McBride’s head snapped around. “I was a combat infantryman during World War II! I spent one year in a German hell camp!”
    “And I guess it didn’t learn you a thing,” Lord said sadly. “Didn’t teach you that a man’s got certain obligations to do what’s right, regardless of whether it’s convenient or what the law will let him get away with. Well”—he opened the car door and paused as he slid from the seat—“I guess I’ll just have to plug up a few holes in your ed-u-cation, Mis-ter McBride. Looks like it was my bounden duty.”
    He nodded, grinning coldly, and departed.
    It was two weeks later that, having caught McBride without a gun permit, and McBride having “resisted arrest,” he beat him insensible.
     
    And now he was face to face with McBride again. And McBride’s gun was aimed at him.
    And McBride, obviously, was more than prepared to use it.
    All he needed was a reason, an excuse, the slightest provocation or justification.
    Perhaps, judging by the half-crazed look in his eyes, he did not even need that.

4
    I n retrospect, it seemed to Tom Lord that there were a dozen ways that he could have handled the situation, any of them better than the one he chose. But that was later. At the time, he was not even conscious of making a