“Can you stake me to two horses in the morning?” Rock asked, after they had exchanged greetings. “I got to hotfoot it on to Billings early.”
“Sure,” Kerr said. “Give you the best we got.”
They sat up late that night, talking. The Capital K had taken over a lovely valley watered by a shining stream, bordered by natural meadows. Kerr had concentrated all his cattle there. They swarmed by tens of thousands over a radius of forty miles. The little man was well content. He would move no more. He had preëmpted a kingdom, and there were no more worlds to conquer. He had built a substantial house and brought his family from Texas for the summer. But, beyond these visible evidences of prosperity, he didn’t talk much about himself. Rock’s story engrossed all his attention. And to the tentative, provisional request with which Rock ended, he gave hearty assent.
“Sure, I will,” he declared. “Hell, I’d do it like a shot, just on your own account. As it happens, I know Uncle Bill Sayre darned well. He loaned me twenty thousand dollars on my unbacked note, one time. I had a speakin’ acquaintance with Dave Snell, too. You go on to Billings and get word to him. Once you get back here I can throw an outfit together for you in a matter of hours. I have saddle horses to burn. An’ I got men that’ll foller you to hell and back again. By gum, that’s some formation up there, if you got it figured right. Same old story—the beggar on horseback. What a fool that man is. Ain’t satisfied with a good thing. Tryin’ to grab the earth, regardless.”
“It may be covered up so that it’ll be hard to get at him personally,” Rock said. “But if I can make sure of the Steering Wheel, I can force his hand. It looks air tight, but there’s always a weak spot in that sort of undertaking you know.”
“You watch he don’t dynamite you. He may have a joker up his sleeve as well as an ace in the hole,” Kerr warned. “I have heard of Buck Walters plenty down South. He’s a smart man. He’s got to be that an’ a cattleman, besides, or he’d never got in so strong with Dave Snell. If you get the goods on him, don’t give him a chance—the dirty dog. Gosh, a man that hires his killin’ done is lower’n a snake in the bottom of a forty-foot well.”
CHAPTER XIV—HOT ON THE TRAIL
Rock chewed a pencil butt until it looked as if it had been mouthed by an earnest puppy. He wrote and erased the length and breadth of half a dozen telegraph forms before he evolved a suitable communication. And finally he thrust the lengthy message through the wicket at the operator. The man pawed over the sheets.
“All one message?” he asked incredulously.
“One message,” Rock assured him.