The smell of bacon cooking watered their mouths and made Warfield and Hawkins look at one another inquiringly. Crazy young women would hardly be expected to carry a camping outfit. But Swan and Lone were treading close on their heels, and their own curiosity pulled them forward. They went carefully around the thicket, guided by the pungent odour of burning pine wood, and halted so abruptly that Swan and Lone bumped into them from behind. A man had risen up from the campfire and faced them, his hands rising slowly, palms outward.
"Warfield, by——!" Al blurted in his outraged astonishment. "Trailing me with a bunch, are yuh? I knew you'd double-cross your own father—but I never thought you had it in you to do it in the open. Damn yuh, what d'yuh want that you expect to get?"
Warfield stared at him, slack-jawed. He glanced furtively behind him at Swan, and found that guileless youth ready to poke him in the back with the muzzle of a gun. Lone, he observed, had another. He looked back at Al, whose eyes were ablaze with resentment. With an effort he smiled his disarming, senatorial smile, but Al's next words froze it on his face.
"I think I know the play you're making, but it won't get you anything, Bill Warfield. You think I slipped up—and you told me not to let my foot slip; said you'd hate to lose me. Well, you're the one that slipped, you damned, rotten coward. I was watching out for leaks. I stopped two, and this one——"
He glanced down at Lorraine, who sat beside the fire, a blanket tied tightly around her waist and her ankles, so that, while comfortably free, she could make no move to escape.
"I was fixing to stop her from telling all she knew," he added harshly. "By to-night I'd have had her married to me, you damned fool. And here you've blocked everything for me, afraid I was falling down on my job!
"Now folks, lemme just tell you a few little things. I know my limit—you've got me dead to rights. I ain't complaining about that; a man in my game expects to get his, some day. But I ain't going to let the man go that paid me my wages and a bonus of five hundred dollars for every man I killed that he wanted outa the way.
"Hawkins knows that's a fact. He's foreman of the Sawtooth, and he knows the agreement. I've got to say for Hawkins that aside from stealing cattle off the nesters and helping make evidence against some that's in jail, Hawkins never done any dirty work. He didn't have to. They paid me for that end of the business.
"I killed Fred Thurman—this girl, here, saw me shoot him. And it was when I told Warfield I was afraid she might set folks talking that he began to get cold feet. Up to then everything was lovely, but Warfield began to crawfish a little. We figured—we figured, emphasise the we, folks,—that the Quirt would have to be put outa business. We knew if the girl told Brit and Frank, they'd maybe get the nerve to try and pin something on us. We've stole 'em blind for years, and they wouldn't cry if we got hung. Besides, they was friendly with Fred.
"The girl and the Swede got in the way when I tried to bump Brit off. I'd have gone into the canyon and finished him with a rock, but they beat me to it. The girl herself I couldn't get at very well and make it look accidental—and anyway, I never did kill a woman, and I'd hate it like hell. I figured if her dad got killed, she'd leave.