Walters stared at him.
“I ain’t buyin’ you,” he said at last. “There’s a cheaper way.”
“All right, turn your wolf loose on me.” Rock laughed. “See what’ll happen. Now you run along, Mister Buck Walters, before I shoot an eye out of you for luck, you dirty scoundrel!”
Rock’s anger burned anew, but he did not on that account lose his head. He abused Walters in a penetrating undertone, with malice, with intent, with venom that was partly real, partly simulated. But he might as well have offered abuse and insult to a stone. He could not stir Walters to any declaration, any admission that would have been a key to what Rock sought.
“Talk is cheap. I don’t care what you say. It don’t hurt me,” the Maltese Cross boss told him stiffly. “I will shut your mouth for good, inside of forty-eight hours.”
And with that he turned his back squarely on Rock and walked to rejoin his friend, Dave Wells, who stood there, ready to shoot in the name of friendship.
Rock stood staring at their twin backs sauntering past lighted saloons. He wouldn’t have turned his back on Walters, after that. Which was a measure of his appraisal of the man’s intent. Buck would make that threat good!
Rock shrugged his shoulders and strolled across the dusty street into the Grand Union. He was little the wiser for that encounter, except that he could look for reprisal, swift and deadly. He wondered calmly what form it would take.
Certainly he had stepped into a hornet’s nest when he stepped into the dead cowpuncher’s boots. Rock lay down on his bed with his clothes still on and stared up at the dusky ceiling. He was trying to put one and one together, to make a logical sum. It made no difference now, whether he was Doc Martin or Rock Holloway. After to-night Buck Walters was an enemy. And Rock reflected contemptuously that he would rather have him as an enemy than a friend.
He recalled again Uncle Bill Sayre’s distrust of his fellow executor. Uncle Bill’s instinct was sound, Rock felt sure in his own soul, now.