As he fell his revolver exclaimed, but only an indignant monosyllable. A veritable avalanche of humanity descended upon him, hard in effect as the rocky ground in their attack with gun butts and fists. For a second time he had miscalculated odds; seemed at last to have met defeat. In the act, as it were, of seizing the Sturgis’ loot, he was put out by a blow from a leather black-jack brought down upon his defenseless head by an expert hand.
Some minutes must have passed before his brain again functioned. In the interim he had been “hogtied,” despite the fact that, literally, the knots were not tied according to the Hoyle of the range. The first thing he noticed on opening his eyes was that Judge Allen had been stripped of his coat and the left sleeves of his outer and under shirts cut away to give place to a bandage. Evidently his instinctive pull on the trigger had sent a bullet into his preferred target, although lack of aim had made it a wing shot.
That the moment was one in which he would best “play Injun” was Pape’s first cautionary thought. Not even to ease his painfully cramped limbs did he attempt to move a muscle. After his first roving look, his eyes fixed, with an acquisitive gleam at variance with his helplessness, upon something protruding from the inside pocket of a coat that lay upon the ground near his hurting head.
The something, or one very like it, he had seen before—a folded document engraved in brown ink. The coat also he recognized as that torn off the wounded lawyer.
He next discovered that his ears, as well as eyes, could function. Without moving, he allowed them to be filled with sound notes upon the disaster which had overtaken him.
The ex-judge: “—and I congratulate you, Duffy, on as neat a turn-table as I’ve ever seen.”
Even more than to the unctuousness of the voice did Pape object to the jurist’s punctuation by boot upon that section of his own anatomy within easiest reach. His indignation, however, was diverted by the assurance that it was his enemy of the cauliflower ear who had brought about his fall.
“Easier than throwing a seven with your own bones, your honor,” Duffy answered. “Wild-and-woolly here was too tickled with himself to notice me under the cart tightening of a bolt. All I had to do was lunge out and grab an ankle.”
“Hadn’t you better go and let some doctor look at that arm, judge?” The concerned voice was Swinton Welch’s. “I’ll direct operations until——”
“You think I’m going right on taking chances on your weakness, Welch?” Allen’s counter-demand snapped with disapproval. “I’ll see this thing through, no matter how it hurts. Send for a surgeon if you know one who don’t insist on reporting gun-shot patients. Come, let’s get this animated interruption stowed away before the police arrive. Questions never asked are easiest answered.”