Jack winced. Mother and sisters he had longed for all his life. "Well, you better be thinking how you'll get out of the scrape you're in," he advised, with a little of Bill Wilson's grimness. "I'm afraid I'm to blame, in a way; and yet, if I hadn't mixed into the fight, you'd be dead by now. Maybe that would have been just as well, seeing how things have turned out," he grinned. "Still—have a smoke?"
"I never used tobacco in my life," declined the youth somewhat primly.
"No, I don't reckon you ever did!" Jack eyed him with a certain amount of pitying amusement. "A fellow that will come gold-hunting without a gun to his name, would not use tobacco, or swear, or do anything that a perfect lady couldn't do! However, you put up a good fight with your fists, old man, and that's something."
"I'd have been killed, though, if you hadn't shot when you did. They were too much for me. I haven't tried to thank you—"
"No, I shouldn't think you would," grinned Jack. "I don't see yet where I've done you any particular favor: from robbers to Vigilance Committee might be called an up-to-date version of 'Out of the frying-pan into the fire.'"
The boy glanced fearfully toward the closed tent-flaps. "Ssh!" he whispered. "The guard can hear—"
"Oh, that's all right," returned Jack, urged perhaps to a conscious bravado by the very weakness of the other. "It's all day with me, anyway. I may as well say what I think.
"And so—" He paused to blow one of his favorite little smoke rings and watch it float to the dingy ridge-pole, where it flickered and faded into a blue haze "—and so, I'm going to say right out in meeting what I think of this town and the Committee they let measure out justice. Justice!" He laughed sardonically. "Poor old lady, she couldn't stop within forty miles of Perkins' Committee if she had forty bandages over her eyes, and both ears plugged with cotton! You wait till their farce of a trial is over. You may get off, by a scratch—I hope so. But unless Bill Wilson—"
"Aw, yuh needn't pin no hopes on Bill Wilson!" came a heavy, malicious voice through the tent wall. "All hell can't save yuh, Jack Allen! You've had a ride out to the oak comin' to yuh for quite a while, and before sundown you'll get it."
"Oh! Is that so, Shorty? Say, you're breaking the rules, you old pirate; you're talking to the prisoners without permission. As the Captain's most faithful dog Tray, you'd better shoot yourself; it'll save the town the trouble of hanging you later on!" He smoked calmly while Shorty, on guard without, growled a vilifying retort, and the other guards snickered.