“Um-m,” he mused. “Mebbe not. No, reckon they wouldn’t. I’ll say that much. But by thunder they’d make you wish they did. They’d claim you trapped Dan’l. You’d suffer for that, and in place of this boy, and a-plenty. Better foller your new man, lady, and let him stow you in safety. Better go back to Benton.”
“Never to Benton,” she declared. “And he’s not 260 my ’new man.’ I apologize to him for that, from you, sir.”
“If you stay, I stay, then,” said I. “But I think we’d best go. It’s the only way.” And it was. We were twain in menace to the outfit and to each other but inseparable. We were yoked. The fact appalled. It gripped me coldly. I seemed to have bargained for her with word and fist and bullet, and won her; now I should appear to carry her off as my booty: a wife and a gambler’s wife. Yet such must be.
“You shall go without me.”
“I shall not.”
With a little sob she buried her face in her hands.
“If you don’t hate me now you soon will,” she uttered. “The cards don’t fall right—they don’t, they don’t. They’ve been against me from the first. I’m always forcing the play.”
Whereupon I knew that go together we should, or I was no man.
“Pshaw, pshaw,” Jenks soothed. “Matters ain’t so bad. We’ll fix ye out and cover your trail. Moon’ll be up in a couple o’ hours. I’d advise you to take an hour’s start of it, so as to get away easier. If you travel straight south’ard you’ll strike the stage road sometime in the mornin’. When you reach a station you’ll have ch’ice either way.”
“I have money,” she said; and sat erect.