"Yeah, I see, all right." Gelle's eyes went cold as they bored into Bud's mind. "Well, what d' you think about it yourself, Bud?"
"I?" Bud looked at him straight. "Whatever you say, Jelly, goes with me."
Gelle stared longer, exhaled a long breath and relaxed to a mirthless grin.
"I oughta lick you, Bud, fer needin' my word. But friendship wabbles when there's money in sight, so—I never went near the damn' place after I packed that back-load of gold away from it. You was behind me—behind us all, fer that matter." Gelle's sudden grin turned a little sardonic. "Still, whatever you say goes with me! I kin be as good a friend as you kin, Bud."
Bud had to laugh, though he felt little enough like it.
"You win, Jelly. I'd have had to do some quick work, but I suppose it would have been humanly possibly for me to duck back up the ledge, grab Palmer's money and come along with it until I saw a place to ditch it where I could come back after it. Fast work—but I did stand in the fringe of the trees by the ledge and watch the stables here until you fellows were out of sight. I wanted to make darn sure you weren't seen."
"Well, I didn't go back either. But the fact remains that the cache is cleaned out—in a hurry, by the look of things around there. And these two dead men dropped in the open, just inside the gate and before they had been to the ledge. For one thing, Jelly, our boys weren't so very far behind them, so Bat and Ed wouldn't have had time to get the stuff, hide it somewhere else and then get into a fight over it and kill each other off before our boys came. They'd have had to do faster work than I would to have raided the cave while you fellows crossed the open down there."
"And awn the other hand, you fellers rode off and left me in easy walkin' distance of the money, and the old man sound asleep and snorin'." Gelle reasoned it out soberly, stating the evidence against himself quite as impartially as Bud had done in his own case. "Yea, I'm the pelican, too, that told Delkin to grab the works. Looks like I'm bogged, right now, and sinkin' fast. Bud, on the face of it, you an' me both is guilty as hell. Ain't we?"
"On the face of it, yes." Bud studied the evidence while he finished rolling a cigarette. "Of course, we can't tell yet just how it will affect the case against Palmer. Not at all, maybe. That's something we have nothing to do with. I wanted you to know the money Delkin left in the cache was gone—how much, none of us know, of course. It's mighty mysterious, don't you think? Say, Jelly, what about those shots? Are you dead certain you heard more than five?"
"Shore I am. But I couldn't prove it, Bud—not in a thousand years. Snowball, his word ain't no good, so there y' are. I believe in my heart that somebody else was after that boodle and Bat and Ed White, they run into 'em, goin' after it theirselves. But that ain't proof. Say, Bud, d' you s'pose Butch Cassidy rode over on the quiet—"