“Step in as quick as you like, gentlemen. You've five minutes to wait, Bill.”
The passengers reentered the coach; the driver and express messenger hurriedly climbed to their places. Hale would have spoken, but an impatient gesture from his companions stopped him. They were evidently listening for something; he listened too.
Yet the silence remained unbroken. It seemed incredible that there should be no indication near or far of that forceful presence which a moment ago had been so dominant. No rustle in the wayside “brush,” nor echo from the rocky canyon below, betrayed a sound of their flight. A faint breeze stirred the tall tips of the pines, a cone dropped on the stage roof, one of the invisible horses that seemed to be listening too moved slightly in his harness. But this only appeared to accentuate the profound stillness. The moments were growing interminable, when the voice, so near as to startle Hale, broke once more from the surrounding obscurity.
“Good-night!”
It was the signal that they were free. The driver's whip cracked like a pistol shot, the horses sprang furiously forward, the huge vehicle lurched ahead, and then bounded violently after them. When Hale could make his voice heard in the confusion—a confusion which seemed greater from the colorless intensity of their last few moments' experience—he said hurriedly, “Then that fellow was there all the time?”
“I reckon,” returned his companion, “he stopped five minutes to cover the driver with his double-barrel, until the two other men got off with the treasure.”
“The TWO others!” gasped Hale. “Then there were only THREE men, and we SIX.”
The man shrugged his shoulders. The passenger who had given up the greenbacks drawled, with a slow, irritating tolerance, “I reckon you're a stranger here?”
“I am—to this sort of thing, certainly, though I live a dozen miles from here, at Eagle's Court,” returned Hale scornfully.
“Then you're the chap that's doin' that fancy ranchin' over at Eagle's,” continued the man lazily.