The Best Western Novels of William MacLeod Raine. William MacLeod Raine
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knotted loosely round his throat. For five minutes the cow-puncher attended strictly to his bets. Then he cursed softly, and asked Collins to exchange places with him.
“This place is my hoodoo. I can't win—” The sentence died in the man's throat, became an inarticulate gurgle of dismay.
He had looked up and met the steady eyes of the sheriff, and the surprise of it had driven the blood from his heart. A revolver thrust into his face could not have shaken him more than that serene smile.
Collins took him by the arm with a jovial laugh meant to cover their retreat, and led him into one of the curtained alcove rooms. As they entered he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Leroy and Neil were still intent on their game. Not for a moment, not even while the barkeeper was answering their call for liquor, did the sheriff release Scott from the rigor of his eyes, and when the attendant drew the curtain behind him the officer let his smile take on a new meaning.
“What did I tell you, Scott?”
“Prove it,” defied Scott. “Prove it—you can't prove it.”
“What can't I prove?”
“Why, that I was in that—” Scott stopped abruptly, and watched the smile broaden on the strong face opposite him. His dull brain had come to his rescue none too soon.
“Now, ain't it funny how people's thoughts get to running on the same thing? Last time I met up with you there you was collecting a hundred dollars and keep-the-change cents from me, and now here you are spending it. It's ce'tinly curious how both of us are remembering that little seance in the Pullman car.”
Scott took refuge in a dogged silence. He was sweating fear.
“Yes, sir. It comes up right vivid before me. There was you a-trainin' your guns on me—”
“I wasn't,” broke in Scott, falling into the trap.
“That's right. How come I to make such a mistake? Of cou'se you carried the sack and York Neil held the guns.”
The man cursed quietly, and relapsed into silence.
“Always buy your clothes in pairs?”
The sheriff's voice showed only a pleasant interest, but the outlaw's frightened eyes were puzzled at this sudden turn.
“Wearing a bandanna same color and pattern as you did the night of our jamboree on the Limited, I see. That's mightily careless of you, ain't it?”
Instinctively a shaking hand clutched at the kerchief. “It don't cut any ice because a hold-up wears a mask made out of stuff like this.”
“Did I say it was a mask he wore?” the gentle voice quizzed.
Scott, beads of perspiration on his forehead, collapsed as to his defense. He fell back sullenly to his first position: “You can't prove anything.”
“Can't I?” The sheriff's smile went out like a snuffed candle. Eyes and mouth were cold and hard as chiseled marble. He leaned forward far across the table, a confident, dominating assurance painted on his face. “Can't I? Don't you bank on that. I can prove all I need to, and your friends will prove the rest. They'll be falling all over themselves to tell what they know—and Mr. Dailey will be holding the sack again, while Leroy and the rest are slipping out.”
The outlaw sprang to his feet, white to the lips.
“It's a damned lie. Leroy would never—” He stopped, again just in time to bite back the confession hovering on his lips. But he had told what Collins wanted to know.
The curtain parted, and a figure darkened the doorway—a slender, lithe figure that moved on springs. Out of its sardonic, devil-may-care face gleamed malevolent eyes which rested for a moment on Dailey, before they came home to the sheriff.
“And what is it Leroy would never do?” a gibing voice demanded silkily.
Scott pulled himself together and tried to bluff, but at the look on his chief's face the words died in his throat.
Collins did not lift a finger or move an eyelash, but with the first word a wary alertness ran through him and starched his figure to rigidity. He gathered himself together for what might come.
“Well, I am waiting. What it is Leroy would never do?” The voice carried a scoff with it, the implication that his very presence had stricken conspirators dumb.
Collins offered the explanation.
“Mr. Dailey was beginning a testimonial of your virtues just as you right happily arrived in time to hear it. Perhaps he will now proceed.”
But Dailey had never a word left. His blunders had been crying ones, and his chief's menacing look had warned him what to expect. The courage oozed out of his heart, for he counted himself already a dead man.
“And who are you, my friend, that make so free with Wolf Leroy's name?” It was odd how every word of the drawling sentence contrived to carry a taunt and a threat with it, strange what a deadly menace the glittering eyes shot forth.
“My name is Collins.”
“Sheriff of Pica County?”
“Yes.”
The eyes of the men met like rapiers, as steady and as searching as cold steel. Each of them was appraising the rare quality of his opponent in this duel to the death that was before him.
“What are you doing here? Ain't Pica County your range?”
“I've been discussing with your friend the late hold-up on the Transcontinental Pacific.”
“Ah!” Leroy knew that the sheriff was serving notice on them of his purpose to run down the bandits. Swiftly his mind swept up the factors of the situation. Should he draw now and chance the result, or wait for a more certain ending? He decided to wait, moved by the consideration that even if he were victorious the lawyers were sure to draw out of the fat-brained Scott the cause of the quarrel.
“Well, that don't interest me any, though I suppose you have to explain a heap how come they to hold you up and take your gun. I'll leave you and your jelly-fish Scott to your gabfest. Then you better run back home to Tucson. We don't go much on visiting sheriffs here.” He turned on his heel with an insolent laugh, and left the sheriff alone with Dailey.
The superb contempt of the man, his readiness to give the sheriff a chance to pump out of Dailey all he knew, served to warn Collins that his life was in imminent danger. On no hypothesis save one—that Leroy had already condemned them both to death in his mind—could he account for such rashness. And that the blow would fall soon, before he had time to confer with other officers, was a corollary to the first proposition.
“He'll surely kill me on sight,” Scott burst out.
“Yes, he'll kill you,” agreed the sheriff, “unless you move first.”
“Move how?”
“Against him. Protect yourself by lining up with me. It's your only show on earth.”
Dailey's eyes flashed. “Then, by thunder, I ain't taking it! I'm no coyote, to round on my pardners.”
“I give it to you straight. He means murder.”
Perspiration poured from the man's face. “I'll light out of the country.”
The sheriff shook his head. “You'd never get away alive. Besides, I want you for holding up the Limited. The safest place for you is in jail, and that's where I'm going to put you. Drop that gun! Quick! That's right. Now, you and I are going out of this saloon by the back door. I'm going to walk beside you, and we're going to laugh and talk as if we were the best of friends, but my hand ain't straying any from the end of my gun. Get that, amigo? All right. Then we'll take a little pasear.”
As Collins and his prisoner reappeared in the main lobby of the Gold Nugget, a Mexican slipped out of the back door of the gambling-house. The sheriff called Hawkes aside.
“I