“Now!” hissed Lanagan, and with one mighty lurch we burst pell-mell into the room. I caught a flashing look at a slender, flannel-shirted figure with a week’s growth of beard as Slim whirled a foot ahead of us and with one leap cleared the room and swung with a murderous long-barrelled Colt in his hand.
His leap was quicker than the spring of a cat. He shot from the hip, but Brady, posted to do just the trick he did, spoiled the shot. Slim’s bullet ripped a two-inch hole through the floor as he crumpled down in a heap.
We stretched him upon the bed. He had got it in the lungs. Wilson started for the doctor.
“Remember,” said Lanagan, “the chief’s orders. You are not to talk. If it gets out, tell all reporters it’s a detinue case. I’ll answer for the rest.”
A few gnomelike, corpselike, yellow faces peered from doors, but a flash from Brady’s star sent them scurrying back. The shot was apparently not heard in the street, for no one came.
Lanagan turned to Slim, who was choking.
“You know what you were wanted for, Slim?” he asked in as cool a voice as a surgeon might ask for your pulse.
“That Oakland job, I suppose,” he gasped. “Well, boys, you did me a good turn croaking me. I never wanted to go back to that hell hole again. I did what I came out to do, what I’ve waited twenty-five years to do, and I’m ready to take my judgment. He sent me up there twenty-five years ago, and he murdered my father as surely as there is a God, who will some day dope it all out right according to a different scheme than they do here.”
Gasping, with many halts, he told his story. The surgeon came, shook his head, and devoted himself to keeping life until the story was taken down.
His father, a wealthy Iowan, had come to Thaddeus Miller’s ranch thirty years ago, bringing with him his entire fortune for investment. The son Ephraim remained at school back home. At Miller’s ranch the boy’s father had been found in the well one day, drowned. A whiskey bottle floated on the water beside him. His entire estate had been willed to Thaddeus Miller. In a sparsely settled community Thaddeus Miller’s story had been accepted—that the brother, in drink, had stumbled into the well. The son had journeyed across the continent to find himself disinherited. He had always been told he was to be his father’s heir. His father in Iowa had been a strict abstainer. So far as the son knew, he had never touched liquor. But his charge, that Thaddeus had in some fashion gotten his father intoxicated, forced him to sign a will, and then pitched him into the well with the bottle, while it created some natural excitement, could never be proved, and in the course of time became forgotten. In spite of a contest, the will stood.