"No, I can't: it stands to reason I can't. What can I do in a country like this with dollars it took two carts to drag here—two carts with six yoke of bullocks apiece? And that's where my cruel luck comes in. All I can take, as things are, is just so much as this knapsack will carry: and even for this I've run some risks."
The man—it was the effect of hunger, perhaps, and exposure and drunkenness on past marches—had an ugly, wolfish face; but his eyes, though cunning, were not altogether evil, not quite formidably evil. She divined that, though lust for the money was driving him, some weakness lay behind it.
"You are a deserter," she said.
"We'll pass that." He seated himself, flinging a leg over the block and laying the two guns side by side on his knees. "I can win back, maybe. As things go, between stragglers and deserters it's hard to choose in these times, and I'll get the benefit of the doubt. I've taken some risks," he repeated, glancing from the guns on his knees to the pile of silver and back: "pretty bad risks, and only to fill my knapsack. But, now it strikes me——Can't you come closer?"
But she held her ground and waited.
"It strikes me, why couldn't we collar the whole of this, we two? We're alone: no one knows; I've but to lift one of these"—he tapped the guns—"and where would you be? But I don't do it. I don't want to do it. You hear me?"
"You don't do it," said Mercedes slowly, "because without me you can't get away with more than a handful of this money. And you want the whole of it."
"You're a clever girl. Yes, I want the whole of it. Who wouldn't? And you can help. Can't you see how?"
"No."