“How much money did this friend uh yours have?” queried Jack Bates innocently.
“Well, when I seen him in Benton, he had somewhere between six and seven hundred dollars. He got it all changed into fifty-dollar bills—”
“Oh, golly!” Jack Bates rolled over in disgust. “Andy’s losing his grip. Why, darn yuh, if you was in a normal, lying condition, you’d make it ten thousand, at the lowest—and I’ve seen the time when you’d uh said fifty thousand; and you’d uh made us swallow the load, too! Buck up and do a good stunt, Andy, or else keep still. Why, Happy Jack could tell that big a lie!”
“Aw, gwan!” Happy Jack rose up to avenge the insult. “Yuh needn’t compare me to Andy Green. I ain’t a liar, and I can lick the darned son-of-a-gun that calls me one. I ain’t, and yuh can’t say I am, unless yuh lie worse’n Andy.”
“Calm down,” urged Weary pacifically. “Jack said yuh could lie; he didn’t say—”
“By gracious, you’d think I was necked up with a whole bunch uh George Washingtons!” growled Andy, half-indignantly. “And what gets me is, that I tell the truth as often as anybody in the outfit; oftener than some I could mention. But that ain’t the point. I’m telling the truth now, when I say somebody ought to hike down to their camp and see what this old skunk has done with Dan. I’d bet money you’d find him sunk in the river, or cached under a cut-bank, or something like that. If he’d kept his face closed I wouldn’t uh give it a second thought, but the more I think uh the story he put up, the more I believe there’s something wrong. He’s made way with Dan somehow, and—”
“Yes. Sure thing,” drawled Pink wickedly. “Let’s organize a searching party and go down there and investigate. It’s only about a three or four days’ trip, through the roughest country the Lord ever stood on end to cool and then forgot till it crumpled down in spots and got set that way, so He just left it go and mixed fresh mud for the job He was working on. Andy’d lead us down there, and we’d find—”
“His friend Dan buried in a tomato can, maybe,” supplied Jack Bates.
“By golly, I’ll bet yuh could put friend Dan into one,” Slim burst out. “By golly, I never met up with no Dan that packed fifty-dollar bills around in his gun-pocket—”
“Andy’s telling the truth. He says so,” reproved Weary. “And when Andy says a thing is the truth, yuh always know—”
“It ain’t.” Cal Emmett finished the sentence, but Weary paid no attention.
“—what to expect. Cadwolloper’s right, and we ought to go down there and make a hunt for friend Dan and his fifty-dollar bills. How many were there, did yuh say?”
“You go to the devil,” snapped Andy, getting up determinedly. “Yuh bite quick enough when anybody throws a load at yuh that would choke a rhinoscerous, but plain truth seems to be too much for the weak heads of yuh. I guess I’ll have to turn loose and lie, so yuh’ll listen to me. There is something crooked about this deal—”
“We all thought it sounded that way,” Weary remarked mildly.
“And if yuh did go down to where them two wintered, you’d find out I’m right. But yuh won’t, and that old cutthroat will get off with the murder—and the money.”
“Don’t he lie natural?” queried Jack Bates solemnly.
That was too much. Andy glared angrily at the group, picked up the wolfer’s rope, turned on his heel and walked off to where his horse was tied; got on him and rode away without once looking back, though he knew quite well that they were watching every move he made. It did not help to smooth his temper that the sound of much laughing followed him as he swung into the trail taken by the man who had left not long before.
Where he went, that afternoon when for some reason sufficient for the foreman—who was Chip Bennett—the Flying U roundup crew lay luxuriously snoring in the shade instead of riding hurriedly and hotly the high divides, no one but Andy himself knew. They talked about him after he left, and told one another how great a liar he was, and how he couldn’t help it because he was born that way, and how you could hardly help believing him. They recalled joyously certain of his fabrications that had passed into the history of the Flying U, and wondered what josh he was trying to spring this time.
“What we ought to do,” advised Cal, “is to lead him on and let him lie his darndest, and make out we believe him. And then we can give him the laugh good and plenty—and maybe cure him.”
“Cure nothing!” exclaimed Jack Bates, getting up because the sun had discovered him, and going over to the mess-wagon where a bit of shade had been left unoccupied. “About the only way to cure Andy of lying, is to kill him. He was working his way up to some big josh, and if yuh let him alone you’ll find out what it is, all right. I wouldn’t worry none about it, if I was you.” To prove that he did not worry, Jack immediately went to sleep.
Such being the attitude of the Happy Family, when Andy rode hurriedly into camp at sundown, his horse wet to the tips of his ears with sweat, they sat up, expectancy writ large upon their faces. No one said anything, however, while Andy unsaddled and came over to beg a belated supper from the cook; nor yet while he squatted on his heels beside the cook-tent and ate hungrily. He seemed somewhat absorbed in his thoughts, and they decided mentally that Andy was a sure-enough good actor, and that if they were not dead next to him and his particular weakness, they would swallow his yarn whole—whatever it was. A blood-red glow was in the sky to the west, and it lighted Andy’s face queerly, like a vivid blush on the face of a girl.
Andy scraped his plate thoughtfully with his knife, looked into his coffee-cup, stirred the dregs absently and dipped out half a spoonful of undissolved sugar, which he swallowed meditatively. He tossed plate, cup and spoon toward the dishpan, sent knife and fork after them and got out his smoking material. And the Happy Family, grouped rather closely together and watching unobtrusively, stirred to the listening point. The liar was about to lie.
“Talk about a guilty conscience giving a man dead away,” Andy began, quite unconscious of the mental attitude of his fellows, and forgetting also his anger of the afternoon, “it sure does work out like that, sometimes. I followed that old devil, just out uh curiosity, to see if he headed for Dry Lake like he said he was going. We didn’t have any reason for keeping cases on him, or suspicioning anything—but he acted like we was all out on his trail, the fool!
“I kinda had a hunch that if he had been up to any deviltry, it would show on him when he left here, and I was plumb right about it. He went all straight enough till he got down into Black Coulee; and right there it looked like he got kinda panicky and suspicious, for he turned square off the trail and headed up the coulee.”
“He must uh had ’em,” Weary commented, quite as if he believed.
“Yuh wait till I’m through,” Andy advised, still wholly unconscious of their disbelief. “Yuh was all kinda skeptical when I told yuh he had a guilty conscience, but I was right about it, and come mighty near laying out on the range tonight with my toes pointing straight up, just because you fellows wouldn’t—”
“Sun-stroke?” asked Pink, coming closer, his eyes showing purple in the softened light.
“No—yuh wait, now, till I tell yuh.” Whereupon Andy smoked relishfully and in silence, and from the tail of his eye watched his audience squirm with impatience. “A man gets along a whole lot better without any conscience,” he began at last, irrelevantly, “’specially if he wants to be mean. I trailed this jasper up the coulee and out on the bench, across that level strip between Black Coulee and Dry Spring Gulch, and down the gulch a mile or so. He was fogging right along, and seemed as if he looked back every ten rods—I know he spotted me just as I struck the level at the head uh Black Coulee, because he acted different then.
“I could see he was making across country for the trail to Chinook, but I wanted to overhaul