“Seems ter me you’re some anxious to hurry us on,” laughed Hackett. “We’re slightly tired, and I reckons we holds up for rest, water or no water.”
“That being the case,” said Curry, “let me give you some advice. Yander I has a few gents what are wanted for various little doings in different parts, and I am takin’ pains careful-like to deliver them over. They’re lawbreakers to the last galoot of the bunch. Mebbe you bothers them none. I does my duty.”
“Oh—ho!” retorted Hackett, “so that’s how the wind blows! Why, certain, Curry, we interferes none whatever with your business. Instead o’ that, we helps you any we can in running in your bunch of bad men.”
“Thanks,” returned the deputy sheriff coolly. “So long as I am not bothered with, I needs no help.”
Hackett laughed again.
“I see, pard,” he said, “you counts on gathering in the reward money yourself, and proposes to divide it none. All right; you’re welcome.”
Then, with his companions, he again rode forward. Curry looked them over critically. In his eyes, with one or two exceptions, they appeared little different from the collection of ruffians who were his prisoners. With them he recognized one man, at least, who had an unenviable reputation—a tall, pockmarked individual—no less a person than Spotted Dan.
There was in the party a man who seemed strangely out of place there. His every appearance was that of a tenderfoot, while his face, with his shaven lips and iron-gray beard, looked like that of a stern old church deacon. Somehow this person interested Curry more than all the others. He wondered not a little at the appearance of such a man in such a party.
“Who is the parsonish gentleman?” asked the deputy sheriff, as Hackett came up with him. He spoke in a low tone and jerked his hand slightly toward the tenderfoot.
“That?” said Hackett loudly. “Why, that is Mr. Felton Cleveland, a gentleman what is looking around some for mining property, and it is him we escorts to Oxboro. He engages us to see that he gets there all safe-like, and he is in a hurry.”