"You saw us cache grub in the cabin?"
The man nodded.
"What if you had found a couple of line riders here? What were you told to do if you found line riders here? I'm wanting the truth—all of it!"
The man hesitated. Lawler's pistol roared, the concussion rocking the air of the cabin. The man staggered back, clapping a hand to his head, where, it seemed to him, the bullet from the pistol had been aimed.
The man brought up against the rear wall of the cabin, beside the fireplace; and he leaned against it, his face ghastly with fright, his lips working soundlessly. The little man cowered, plainly expecting Lawler would shoot him, too. And Lawler's gun did swing up again, but the voice of the tall man came, blurtingly:
"Warden told us to knife any men we found here."
Lawler's lips straightened, and his eyes glowed with a passion so intense that the men shrank, gibbering, in the grip of a mighty paralysis.
Lawler walked to the table and sat beside it, placing the gun near his right hand. The men watched him, fascinated; noting his swift movements as he plunged a hand into a pocket and drew out a small pad of paper and a pencil. He wrote rapidly upon a leaf of the pad; then got up, stepped back and ordered the tall man to approach the table.
"Write your name below what I have written—and date it."
When both men had signed the paper, Lawler folded it, stuck it between some leaves of the pad, and replaced pad and pencil in his pocket.