The fellow looked up at him, nodded and lifted a hand shaking from cramp. Abington unscrewed the cap and steadied the canteen to the man’s mouth. He drank thirstily, pushed the canteen away with the back of his hand, lifted his hat and drew a palm across his flushed forehead where the veins stood out like heavy cords drawn just under the skin.
“Thanks!” He gave Abington another glance, a gleam in his eyes as of throttled speech.
“Have a smoke. Here, keep the case while we’re getting the car started.” Abington glanced at the officer. “You’ve no objection, I suppose?”
“Hell, no! What do you take me for? Just because I use some precautions against being brained while I’m busy driving don’t mean I’m hard boiled.” He sent a measuring glance toward either side of the straight-walled cañon. Within half a mile there was no cover for a man, and the cliffs rose sheer. “You can get out if you want to, Bill,” he said to the prisoner. “Guess you won’t go far with them leg irons.”
“Thanks.” The prisoner’s voice was perfunctory, and he seemed in no great hurry to avail himself of the privilege. While the others walked to the stalled car—the deputy watching over his shoulder—the prisoner sat where he was, smoking a cigarette from Abington’s leather-and-silver case.
The stalled car refused to start. That mechanical condition, which is called freezing, held the cylinders locked fast until such time as the expansion subsided, and in the fierce heat of that cañon the motor cooled very slowly. Abington suggested coasting backward to the first place where a turnout had been provided.
“There’s a turnout, back here a couple of hundred yards or such a matter. If you can give me a push over this little hump, I think the car will roll down the road easily enough,” he explained. “I’ll have to keep it in the road, sheriff, or I could manage alone.”
The deputy rather liked being called sheriff, and he was anxious to reach Carson City that evening with his prisoner. Until Abington’s car moved out of the way, he himself was stalled, since he could not move forward more than the hundred feet which separated the two cars. There was no other road down that cañon.
“If Bill Jonathan wasn’t feeling so tough, I’d take off the hobbles and make him get out and help,” he grumbled, looking back at the roadster. “But I guess he’s sick, all right. He ain’t left the car yet. Well, you get in and hold ’er in the ruts, Mister”
“My name is Abington. I’m an archaeologist—”