From Place to Place by Irvin S. Cobb

Until now Trencher -- to give him the name by which of all the names he used he best was known -- had kept his temper in hobbles, no matter what or how great the provocation. As one whose mode of livelihood was trick and device outside the law it had behooved him ever to restrain himself from violent outbreaks, to school and curb and tame his natural tendencies as a horsebreaker might gentle a spirited colt. A man who held his disposition always under control could think faster than any man who permitted his passions to jangle his nerves. Besides, he had the class contempt of the high-grade confidence man -- the same being the aristocrat of the underworld -- for the crude and violent and therefore doubly dangerous codes of the stick-up, who is a highwayman; and the prowler, who is a burglar; and the yegg, who is a safe blower of sorts.

Until now Trencher had held fast by the self-imposed rules of his self-imposed discipline, and so doing had lived well and lived safe. It was an unfortunate thing all round that this little rat of a Sonntag had crossed him at an hour when he was profoundly irritated by the collapse of their elaborately planned and expensive scheme to divest that Cheyenne cattleman of his bank roll at the wire game. And it was a doubly unfortunate thing for Sonntag seeing that Sonntag had just been shot three times with his own automatic and was now dead or should be.