“Don’t you reckon you better talk, Stack?” he suggested.
The man’s mouth shut in a tight line.
Rock lit the fire with the same match he used for his cigarette. When it began to crackle briskly he laid hold of the boot on Stack’s free foot and jerked it off. The man’s face went livid. For a second he struggled in a momentary panic, then lay still, his face gradually turning ashy, little beads of moisture breaking out on his forehead.
Rock addressed him quite casually.
“I want to know just why Buck Walters is so anxious to have me killed off. I want to know what sort of skin game he is working on the Maltese Cross, and how he works it. I want to know why he was so eager to hang Doc Martin when he thought he had failed at bushwhacking him. You know why, I am pretty sure. Cough up what you do know.”
“I don’t know nothin’ except that Buck offered me and Hurley five hundred dollars to put your light out. That’s all I know.”
“You are lying,” Rock said. “I will jog your memory a little, I think.”
With a jerk he drew the man close to the fire and thrust his foot at the small, hot blaze. Stack jerked his knee up. Rock put his spurred foot on that cocked knee, forced it down, and stood on it with all his weight. The heat made a singeing smell rise from the man’s sock. His eyes bulged. He set his teeth in his under lip. Rock stood over him, holding him helpless. Outwardly Rock was hard and merciless, but inwardly he felt his stomach turning. He hated the thing he had set his hand to. It was a contest of a sort between his fundamental humanity, his sense of decency, and the nerve of this cowardly assassin. And Stack weakened a trifle before Rock felt he could go no farther with that fiery ordeal.
“Oh!” Stack groaned. “Let up! I’ll tell you.”