“Sweet pardner!... Precious pal!”
Pape always remembered his “grave” and the ensuing silence within its dank dark as the most cheerful place and the livest moment of his life.
Only the moment, however, did he allow himself.
“I’ve got to reward you by leaving you again, but not for long. Don’t bother promising this time. Just wait until I bring the real tenant of this tomb.”
Samuel Allen, while seated upon a bowlder of trap-rock that divided the opening, watching the start of the delayed excavation, felt himself seized without warning from behind. Before he had time to utter more than a gasp he was dragged back into the cave. Perhaps pain from his injured shoulder made him speechless. Possibly surprise at the assault of the “scorpion,” just now unconscious and soundly trussed, had something to do with his inefficiency. He still seemed incapable of protest when the captive-turned-captor searched his coat pockets and extracted their contents.
Jane, the while, had taken advantage of her absolution from oath to follow guardedly; with automatic ready now appeared from darkness into the light of the entrance.
“If he so much as whines, shoot him—and shoot to kill this time!” Pape directed. “He deserves punishment and on two counts, I think. Just a minute. I want to make sure.”
Stepping nearer the opening, he began to run through the letters and documents taken from the jurist’s coat.
“Jane Lauderdale! Can it really be you, my child?” At last Allen drew upon his font of sebaceousness. “I hope that you, too, are not in the power of this impossible——”
“She isn’t. I’m in hers.”