“Well, that’s all right!” returned the Widow from the darkness. “You can’t sneak in and jump mymine!”
“Yourmine, you old tarrier!” yelled Wiley furiously. “You’d better go to town and look it up. The whole danged works is mine–I bought it in for taxes!”
40“You–what?” cried the Widow, brushing Virginia and Charley aside and halting him in the trail. “You bought the Paymaster for taxes!”
“Yes, for taxes,” answered Wiley, “and got stung at that! Gimme eighty-three dollars and forty-one cents and you can have it back, with costs. But now listen, you old battle-ax; I’ve taken enough off of you. You went up on my property when I was making an inspection of it and made an attempt on my life; and if I hear a peep out of you, from this time on, I’ll go down and swear out a warrant.”
“I didn’t aim to kill you,” defended the Widow, weakly. “I just tried to shoot you in the leg.”
“Well, you did it,” returned Wiley, and, pushing; her aside, he limped on down the trail. The Widow followed meekly, talking in low tones with her daughter, and at last Virginia came up beside him.
“Take him right to our house,” she said to Charley, “and I’ll nurse him until he gets well.”
“No, you take me to the Holman house!” directed Wiley, obstinately. “I guess we’ve got a house of our own.”
“Well, suit yourself,” she murmured, and fell back to the rear while Wiley went hobbling on. At every step he jabbed the muzzle of the shotgun vindictively into the ground, but as he reached the flat and met a posse of citizens, he submitted to being carried on a door. The first pain had passed and a deadly numbness seemed to take the 41place of its bite; but as he moved his stiffened muscles, which were beginning to ache and throb, he realized that he was badly hurt. With a leg like that he could not drive out across the desert, seventy-four long miles to Vegas; nor would he, on the other hand, find the best of accommodations in the deserted house of his father. It had been a great home in its day, but that day was past, and the water connections too, and somebody must be handy to wait on him.
“Say,” he said, turning to Death Valley Charley, “have you got a house here in town? Well, take me to it and I’ll pay you well, and for anything else that you do.”