Until Cassidy, cornered and desperate, found the one weapon he still had left to swing.
"Ask him what happened to the other five!" Cassidy said, louder now, jabbing a shaking finger at the old man. "Go on, ask him! Five names, five towns, and not one of them walked away from meeting him, either! He hunted every last one down and put every last one of them in the ground himself! I was seventeen and scared out of my mind! What's his excuse?"
The room's mood shifted: subtle, but unmistakable. A crowd realizing it might have just traded fear of one dangerous man for something uncomfortably close to admiration of another. A miner near the faro table set his cards down slow. Somebody near the door murmured to his neighbor, low and uneasy. Even Elias Boone's expression had gone careful, weighing something he clearly hadn't expected to have to weigh tonight.
The old man didn't deny it. "Five names," he said. "Every one of them answered for what they did that night. I told myself after each one that it would finally settle something in me that had never once settled since. It never did. Just gave me five more nights I still remember exactly as clearly as the fire itself."
He looked around the room, meeting the doubt in it without flinching from a single face.
"I'm not asking anybody here to think better of me for that. I did what I did, and I've carried it every day since. I'm only telling this room what I've already decided to do about the sixth name."
Elias Boone crossed the room and picked up both of Cassidy's revolvers from the floor, checking the loads out of old habit, and set them on the bar rather than hand them back to anyone just yet. "Reckon that's fair to hear out," he said, loud enough for the whole room. "Man's earned the right to explain the difference, seeing as how he's the only one of the two of you who's bothered admitting to anything at all tonight."
The old man drew his own Colt, slow and deliberate, and thumbed back the hammer.
Cassidy went rigid in the chair, certain for one long, airless second that this was exactly how his night was going to end.