Mr. Graham was soon dressed and ready to start. He took the pistol from Murphy and turned to Qualley. “All right, Qualley, let’s go. You fellows see how hard you can sleep till I get back. You may need all you can get, for now that we have a line on these fellows I am not going to stop till I have every one of them behind the bars where they belong.”
Qualley made one more try. “It might be healthier here in the future,” he remarked, “if I was not included in this bunch.”
Mr. Graham turned upon him angrily and glared at him for a minute. Then he burst out laughing. “You must be losing your nerve, Qualley, or your senses, if you think that you can scare me with a threat. I thought that you knew me better than that. Move along and I’ll put you where I will not even have to think about you, to say nothing of being afraid of you.”
CHAPTER XXII
It seemed to Scott that he had scarcely closed his eyes when he heard the screen door bang and Mr. Graham was standing in the doorway.
“Well, well,” he laughed, “still pounding your ears? I guess you did not get even as much sleep as I said.”
Scott glanced curiously at his watch and then listened to see if it was running. It was three-thirty. “Thirteen hours,” he gasped in astonishment.
“Humph,” Murphy grunted, “that’s nothing. I’ll bet I could do it again right now.”
“Might as well try it if that is the way you feel about it,” Mr. Graham laughed. “It’s so late now that there is no use in our starting till morning.”
“Oh, that is not the reason,” Mr. Graham assured Scott when he noticed his crestfallen look. “I’m mean enough to have called you at five o’clock if I had been here to do it, but I just this minute got back. The sheriff was not at home and I thought I’d better escort our friend straight to the jail myself. I did not feel as though I wanted to trust anybody as slick as he has proved himself to be to any sheriff’s woodshed for safe-keeping. That is what the sheriff’s wife suggested.”