The other boy was a year or two younger than his companion, with a dark, sinister face and shifty eyes. They had walked southward from Gold Hill for many miles, and while the younger lad was an athlete and ordinarily in good physical condition, yet a few days of reckless living had sapped his endurance. He was almost as exhausted as his companion.
“Here’s a go!” muttered the younger lad, looking down grimly at the unconscious, deathlike face of his friend in the trail. “Shoup hasn’t the backbone of a jellyfish. I’ve got to do something for him, but what?”
The boy looked around him and discovered that Shoup had fallen only a few yards from the edge of a pool. The sight of water suggested the means for reviving the fainting lad, and, with considerable difficulty, the other dragged him to the pool’s edge. Wetting a handkerchief in the pool, he bathed the pallid face. In a few moments Shoup drew a deep breath and opened his eyes.
“You’re pretty near a wreck, Shoup,” said the boy called Len crossly. “How do you think we’re ever going to get to the gulch if you can’t walk four or five miles without crumpling up in the trail?”
“I was trying to save the dope,” was Shoup’s answer, in a weak voice. “I haven’t got much of it, and no money to buy any more.”
“Cut that out,” the other growled angrily. “The more of that stuff you use, the more you have to use. It’s making you ‘dippy’ as blazes; not only that, but it eats up your muscle and ruins your nerves. Why don’t you quit?”
“Can’t quit. My old man used it, and my grandfather used it. The hankering for the stuff was born in me. What’s bred in the bone, Lenning, is bound to come out in the flesh. No use fighting against the craving. Here, help me to sit up.”
Lenning put his hands under Shoup’s shoulders and lifted him to a sitting posture, twisting him about so he could lean his back against a bowlder. With fingers that trembled from weakness, Shoup pushed up his left sleeve.
The skin of his arm was white as marble, and dotted with little, black, specklike marks. Reaching into an inside pocket of his coat, Shoup drew out a small, worn morocco case.
“Bound to squirt a little more of that poison into your veins, eh?” asked Lenning disgustedly.