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Updated: June 15, 2025
Where Scott had come from, how he had got through the pickets posted by Levake himself these questions, for which he could find no answer, disquieted the murderer. Arnold, reprieved from death as by a miracle, stood like a statue. Levake, with his hand on his pistol, had halted, petrified, at the sight of Scott.
It was becoming painfully evident that the onlookers were merely waiting to see Levake shoot him down. "No man in Medicine Bend can insult me and live," cried Levake, winding up a tirade of abuse. "I'm known from one end of this street to the other. Nobody can spread lies in it about me." He drew and flourished a revolver as he spoke. None in the crowd interfered with so much as a word.
"You might as well ask a jack-rabbit to tackle a mountain lion as to try to get Brush to arrest Levake," declared Dave Hawk cynically. But Stanley's hand struck the table like a hammer: "We are going to have a show-down here. We will go through the forms; this is the beginning and I am going to follow it to the end. Either Levake has got to quit the town or I have."
But even before the outlaw had finished what he was saying, a man of medium size and easy manner elbowed his way quietly through the circle of spectators, and, taking Bucks by the arm, drew him back and faced Levake himself. It was Bob Scott. "What's all this about, Levake?" demanded Scott gently. Levake had no alternative but to turn his wrath upon the Indian scout.
Levake made no response beyond a further glance at the boy somewhat contemptuous; but he said nothing and picking up his package walked out. No one opposed him. Indeed, had the operator been interested he would have noticed with what marked alacrity every man, as he passed through the waiting-room, got out of Levake's way.
Arriving there, Arnold was asked to dress the wound of a man that had been shot through the breast in the fight along Fort Street. While he was working over his patient, who lay on a table surrounded by a motley crowd of onlookers, Levake walked in. He nodded to the surgeon and drawing a pocket knife, while Arnold was cleansing the wound, sat down beside him to whittle a stick.
"I hear your man, Stanley, wants me," began Levake after an interval. "I guess you hear right," returned Arnold dryly. "Tell him for me to come get me, will you?" suggested Levake. "If he ever comes after you, Levake, he will get you," returned Arnold, looking the outlaw straight in the eye. "There isn't any doubt about that," he added, resuming his task. Levake whittled but made no reply.
"What's that?" he demanded, throwing his head menacingly forward. Bucks repeated his request, but so mildly that Levake took additional umbrage at his diffidence. "See here," he muttered in a voice beginning like a distant roll of thunder and gathering force and volume as he continued, "don't insult me." Bucks ventured to urge that he intended no insult.
A fusillade of shots rang down the street. The air between the two men, feinting like boxers in their deadly duel, filled with whitish smoke. Arnold, stunned by the suddenness of the encounter, jumped out of range. In the next moment he saw Levake sink to the sidewalk.
The operator, nodding as he came up, asked Levake, without parley, whether he would give him the money for the express charges on the cartridges. If Bucks had exploded a keg of powder on the sidewalk there could not have been a greater change in the outlaw's manner. He stared at Bucks with contempt enough to pierce the feelings of the wooden Indian beside which he stood.
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