The Greatest Adventure Books - MacLeod Raine Edition. William MacLeod Raine

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.”

      In a few sentences he and Collins arranged a meeting for next day up in the hills. He trailed his spurs through the dust toward Alice Mackenzie, and offered her his brown hand and wistful smile irresistible. “Good-by. This is where you get quit of me for good.”

      “Oh, I hope not,” she told him impulsively. “We must always be friends.”

      He laughed ruefully. “Your father wouldn't indorse those unwise sentiments, I reckon—and I'd hate to bet your husband would,” he added audaciously, with a glance at Collins. “But I love to hear you say it, even though we never could be. You're a right game, stanch little pardner. I'll back that opinion with the lid off.”

      “You should be a good judge of those qualities. I'm only sorry you don't always use them in a good cause.”

      He swung himself to his saddle. “Good-by.”

      “Good-by—till we meet again.”

      “And that will be never. So-long, sheriff. Tell Forbes I've got a particular engagement in the hills, but I'll be right glad to meet him when he comes.”

      He rode up the draw and disappeared over the brow of the hillock. She caught another glimpse of him a minute later on the summit of the hill beyond. He waved a hand at her, half-turning in his saddle as he rode.

      Presently she lost him, but faintly the wind swept back to her a haunting snatch of uncouth song:

      “Oh, bury me out on the lone prairee,

       In my narrow grave just six by three,”

      Were the words drifted to her by the wind. She thought it pathetically likely he might get the wish of his song.

      To Sheriff Forbes, dropping into the draw a few minutes later with his posse, Collins was a well of misinformation literally true. Yes, he had followed Miss Mackenzie's trail into the hills and found her at a mountain ranch-house. She had been there a couple of days, and was about to set out for the Rocking Chair with the owner of the place, when he arrived and volunteered to see her as far as her uncle's ranch.

      “I reckon there ain't any use asking you if you seen anything of Wolf Leroy's outfit,” said Forbes, a weather-beaten Westerner with a shrewd, wrinkled face.

      “No, I reckon there's no use asking me that,” returned Collins, with a laugh that deceptively seemed to include the older man in the joke.