"Let's wake the old devil up," Tony suggested recklessly, as they neared the gate and fired two shots into the Palmer roof-tree.
"Yeah! Let him know we ain't sneakin' past his door, scared he'll sick his dog on to us!" Jack Rosen lifted his gun and sent splinters flying from two shingles.
"Bet he don't keep no dog. Too darn stingy to feed one. Aye—Palmer! Yore roof's leaky!" Bob Leverett yelled, in a voice trained to carry across a restless herd, and splintered another shingle.
The front door opened abruptly and Palmer himself stood briefly revealed to the four riders halted in the roadway just outside the big, closed gate. Palmer waved a rifle and yelled obscene epithets until Tony stopped that with a leaden pellet planted neatly between his feet. Palmer jumped, banged the door shut and took a shot at them through a window. Evidently he had no intention of killing in broad daylight, for he shot high.
"His loyal henchmen must be gone somewheres. T' town, mebbe," Tony surmised shrewdly. "The old devil could hit some one if he wanted to, but he knows damn' well we'd git him if he did, so he's jest expressin' his sentiments in a general way, same as we are. What say, boys? Shall we take him along with us to town?"
"Hell, what'd we want him for?" Jack Rosen's voice was heavy with disgust. "He shore ain't good comp'ny."
"Oh, I jest thought mebbe we might take him along because he wouldn't want to go," Tony replied naïvely, slipping cartridges into his gun. "There goes that foolish jasper. Rest of 'em must be in town. Well, how about it?"
"Takin' him along would shore hurt my feelin's worse than it would his, fer I'd be in worse comp'ny than he would. What say we ride on in and see what's goin' on, and if the rest of these birds is there? If so, we can clean up on what's in town and come back out here later on. Mebbe Palmer'll foller us in. Be jest like him to have the law on us, don't you know it? I'm goin' to rip off another shingle and go about my business, I'm dry as a bleached bone."
They proceeded to rip off several shingles. But Palmer did not choose to retaliate, so they rode on, yelling derisively until they were out of hearing. Within a mile they had settled down and were tardily making plans calculated to stir Smoky Ford out of its lethargy and give it something to talk about. The idea was Tony's, and he was so proud of it that he could afford to give some credit to Bob as a true prophet when they topped a rise and had a glimpse of a horseman just riding out of Palmer's gate. Palmer, following them in, no doubt meant to stir up trouble for them before he was through. Well, let him. Trouble was what the Meadowlark boys were looking for to-day.
"I can see now how he come to take a quirtin' from Lark," Mark Hanley said contemptuously. "He's yeller as mustard, without the bite. Jest the kind that would cave in a man's head when he wasn't lookin'. 'Twouldn't a took much nerve to shoot up the bunch of us, him in the house like that and us in the open. We got to git that old coot in a corner, somehow. Now, Tony, that idee of yourn—"