“Well,” Andy lifted his head and shoulders that he might readjust a pillow to his liking, “we wanted him to make a getaway. Fact is, if he hadn't, we'd have been—strictly up against it. Right! If he hadn't—how about it, Mig? I guess we'd have been to the Little Rockies ourselves.”
“You've got a sweet little voice,” Irish cut in savagely, “but we're tired. We'd rather hear yuh say something!”
“Oh—all right. Well, Mig and I just ribbed up a josh on Dunk. I'd read somewhere about the same kinda deal, so it ain't original; I don't lay any claim to the idea at all; we just borrowed it. You see, it's like this: We figured that a man as mean as this Dunk person most likely had stepped over the line, somewhere. So we just took a gambling chance, and let him do the rest. You see, we never saw him before in our lives. All that identification stunt of ours was just a bluff. But the minute I shoved my chips to the center, I knew we had him dead to rights. You were there. You saw him wilt. By gracious—”
“Yuh don't know anything against him?” gasped Irish.
“Not a darned thing—any more than what you all know,” testified Andy complacently.
It took a minute or two for that to sink in.
“Well, I'll be damned!” breathed Irish.
“We did chain him to the anvil,” Andy went on. “On the way down, we talked about being in a hurry to get back to you fellows, and I told Mig—so Dunk could hear—that we wouldn't bother with the horse. We tied him to the corral. And I hunted around for that bum chain, and then we made out we couldn't find the padlock for the door; so we decided, right out loud, that he'd be dead safe for an hour or two, till the bunch of us got back. Not knowing a darn thing about him, except what you boys have told us, we sure would have been in bad if he hadn't taken a sneak. Fact is, we were kinda worried for fear he wouldn't have nerve enough to try it. We waited, up on the hill, till we saw him sneak down to the corral and jump on his horse and take off down the coulee like a scared coyote. It was,” quoth the young man, unmistakably pleased with himself, “pretty smooth work, if you ask me.”
“I'd hate to ride as fast and far to-night as that hombre will,” supplemented Miguel with his brief smile, that was just a flash of white, even teeth and a momentary lightening of his languorous eyes.
Slim stood for five minutes, a stolid, stocky figure in the midst of a storm of congratulatory comment. They forgot all about Happy Jack, asleep inside the house, and so their voices were not hushed. Indeed, Big Medicine's bull-like remarks boomed full-throated across the coulee and were flung back mockingly by the barren hills. Slim did not hear a word they were saying; he was thinking it over, with that complete mental concentration which is the chief recompense of a slow-working mind. He was methodically thinking it all out—and, eventually, he saw the joke.