He walked moodily over to the makeshift bed of his patient and stared blankly. There was no patient. A shout brought Bill and the two nosed along the cliff like hounds baffled over a warm trail suddenly wiped out with water.
Because the man had been obliged to crawl, it was manifestly impossible for him to get far. Even so, they were a good half hour in running him down and then it was the slight indentations of his knees in a skift of sand behind a bush that gave the clew.
Bill went down on all fours and disappeared. After a minute or two, Abington followed.
It might have been an oversized badger hole, so far as outward appearances went. Even in his haste the trained mind of Abington noted a cunning arrangement of rocks deliberately piled haphazard against the cliff at some time long past, as the twisted roots of old bushes and trees clinging the twining down through the dirt-filled interstices gave mute testimony.
Yet the rock pile was in reality a solid, arched covering for the sloped entrance to another cave, in the mouth of which Jack Huntley lay sweating with the pain of his wound, as frenziedly malevolent as a rattler pinned under a rock.
Kneeling facing each other with the wounded man gasping curses between them, Abington and Bill Jonathan locked glances; Abington’s eyes coldly searching; Bill’s defiant, hurt and trying to cover a certain wistfulness he would have denied with much profanity.
“He’s got to clear me with the law!” Bill said between clenched jaws. “He’s the only man on earth that can do it. He pulled the robbery they laid onto me and if he don’t come clean I’ll kill him inch by inch!”
Jack Huntley turned his head and sent a glance to Bill’s face; shifted his eyes to Abington’s, that were black as ebony and quite as hard; turned again to Bill and met a cold stare that shriveled his courage to whining cowardice.
“Don’t you, Bill! I—I’m done for! You can’t hurt a dying man! You wouldn’t have the heart!”