“By thunder, I AM game. I've got a kick coming, sorr.”
“Yes?” Leroy rolled and lit a cigarette, his black eyes fixed intently on the malcontent. “Well, register it on the jump. I've got to be off.”
“That's the point.” The curly-headed Neil had lounged up to his comrade's support. “Why have you got to be off? We don't savvy your game, cap.”
“Perhaps you would like to be major-domo of this outfit, Neil?” scoffed his chief, eying him scornfully.
“No, sir. I ain't aimin' for no such thing. But we don't like the way things are shaping. What does all this here funny business mean, anyhow?” His thumb jerked toward Collins, already mounted and waiting for Leroy to join him. “Two days ago this world wasn't big enough to hold him and you. Well, I git the drop on him, and then you begin to cotton up to him right away. Big dinner last night—champagne corks popping, I hear. What I want to know is what it means. And here's this Miss Mackenzie. She's good for a big ransom, but I don't see it ambling our way. It looks darned funny.”
“That's the ticket, York,” derided Leroy. “Come again. Turn your wolf loose.”
“Oh! I ain't afraid to say what I think.”
“I see you're not. You should try stump-speaking, my friend. There's a field fox you there.”
“I'm asking you a question, Mr. Leroy.”
“That's whatever,” chipped in Reilly.
“Put a name to it.”
“Well, I want to know what's the game, and where we come in.”
“Think you're getting the double-cross?” asked Leroy pleasantly, his vigilant eyes covering them like a weapon.
“Now you're shouting. That's what I'd like right well to know. There he sits”—with another thumbjerk at Collins—“and I'm a Chink if he ain't carryin' them same two guns I took offen him, one on the train and one here the other day. I ain't sayin' it ain't all right, cap. But what I do say is—how about it?”
Leroy did some thinking out loud. “Of course I might tell you boys to go to the devil. That's my right, because you chose me to run this outfit without any advice from the rest of you. But you're such infants, I reckon I had better explain. You're always worrying those fat brains of yours with suspicions. After we stuck up the Limited you couldn't trust me to take care of the swag. Reilly here had to cook up a fool scheme for us all to hide it blindfold together. I told you straight what would happen, and it did. When Scott crossed the divide we were in a Jim Dandy of a hole. We had to have that paper of his to find the boodle. Then Hardman gets caught, and coughs up his little recipe for helping to find hidden treasure. Who gets them both? Mr. Sheriff Collins, of course. Then he comes visiting us. Not being a fool, he leaves the documents behind in a safety-deposit vault. Unless I can fix up a deal with him, Mr. Reilly's wise play buncoes us and himself out of thirty thousand dollars.”
“Why don't you let him send for the papers first?”
“Because he won't do it. Threaten nothing! Collins ain't that kind of a hairpin. He'd tell us to shoot and be damned.”
“So you've got it fixed with him?” demanded Neil.
“You've a head like a sheep, York,” admired Leroy. “YOU don't need any brick-wall hints to hit you. As your think-tank has guessed, I have come to an understanding with Collins.”
“But the gyurl—I allow the old major would come down with a right smart ransom.”
“Wrong guess, York. I allow he would come down with a right smart posse and wipe us off the face of the earth. Collins tells me the major has sent for a couple of Apache trailers from the reservation. That means it's up to us to hike for Sonora. The only point is whether we take that buried money with us or leave it here. If I make a deal with Collins, we get it. If I don't, it's somebody else's gold-mine. Anything more the committee of investigation would like to know?” concluded Leroy, as his cold eyes raked them scornfully and came to rest on Reilly.
“Not for mine,” said Neil, with an apologetic laugh. “I'm satisfied. I just wanted to know. And I guess Cork corroborates.”
Reilly growled something under his breath, and turned to hulk away.
“One moment. You'll listen to me, now. You have taken the liberty to assume I was going to sell you out. I'll not stand that from any man alive. To-morrow night I'll get back from Tucson. We'll dig up the loot and divide it. And right then we quit company. You go your way and I go mine.” And with that as a parting shot, Leroy turned on his heel and went direct to his horse.
Alice Mackenzie might have searched the West with a fine-tooth comb and not found elsewhere two such riders for an escort as fenced her that day. Physically they were a pair of superb animals, each perfect after his fashion. If the fair-haired giant, with his lean, broad shoulders and rippling flow of muscles, bulked more strikingly in a display of sheer strength, the sinewy, tigerish grace of the dark Apollo left nothing to be desired to the eye. Both of them had been brought up in the saddle, and each was fit to the minute for any emergency likely to appear.
But on this pleasant morning no test of their power seemed likely to arise, and she could study them at her ease without hindrance. She had never seen Leroy look more the vagabond enthroned. For dress, he wore the common equipment of Cattleland—jingling spurs, fringed chaps, leather cuffs, gray shirt, with kerchief knotted loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win from his sardonic gloom one of his quick, flashing smiles.
He countered by telling her what he had heard York say to Reilly of her. “She's a princess, Cork,” York had said. “Makes my Epitaph gyurl look like a chromo beside her. Somehow, when she looks at a fellow, he feels like a whitewashed nigger.”
All of them laughed at that, but both Leroy and the sheriff tried to banter her by insisting that they knew exactly what York meant.
“You can be very splendid when you want to give a man that whitewashed feeling; he isn't right sure whether he's on the map or not,” reproached the train-robber.
She laughed in the slow, indolent way she had, taking the straw hat from her dark head to catch better the faint breath of wind that was soughing across the plains.
“I didn't know I was so terrible. I don't think you ever had any awe of anybody, Mr. Leroy.” Her soft cheek flushed in unexpected memory of that moment when he had brushed aside all her maiden reserves and ravished mad kisses from her. “And Mr. Collins is big enough to take care of himself,” she added hastily, to banish the unwelcome recollection.
Collins, with his eyes on the light-shot waves that crowned her vivid face, wondered whether he was or not. If she had been a woman to desire in the queenly, half-insolent indifference of manner with which she had first met him, how much more of charm lay in this piquant gaiety, in the warm sweetness of her softer and more pliant mood! It seemed to him she had the gift of comradeship to perfection.
They unsaddled and ate lunch in the shade of the live-oaks at El Dorado Springs, which used to be a much-frequented watering-hole in the days when Camp Grant thrived and mule-skinners freighted supplies in to feed Uncle Sam's pets. Two hours later they stopped again at the edge of the Santa Cruz wash, two miles from the Rocking Chair Ranch.
It was while they were resaddling that Collins caught sight of a cloud of dust a mile or two away. He unslung his field-glasses, and looked long at the approaching dust-swirl. Presently he handed the binoculars to Leroy.
“Five of them; and that round-bellied Papago pony in front belongs to Sheriff Forbes, or I'm away wrong.”
Leroy lowered the glasses, after a long, unflurried inspection. “Looks that way to me. Expect I'd better be burning the wind.”