It was a good bet. When I got to the station for our old ranch, below Cody, forty miles from where our ranch was when we lived there, there wasn't very many people around the station that I knew. A good many new men was there, with wide hats, and leggings on their legs, and breeches that buttons on the side—folks that had come out West to be right Western. Most of 'em come out to raise bananas on the Yellow Bull and be gentlemen farmers, I reckon.
I looks around among these people for a good while. None of them paid much attention to me. At last I seen him. Yes; it was that hired man. He was getting ready to drive out of town with a pair of mules hitched to a buckboard. He was fixing in some boxes and things. I knowed him in a minute.
But where was she? I waited to see if Bonnie Bell would come out anywhere; but she didn't.
I walked over to him; and he seen me standing there looking at him just as he was going to pull out. I went on over and got onto the seat with him.
"Drive right on straight out of town," says I, quiet. "Don't say anything. Just act like nothing had happened," says I.
Under my coat I pushed the muzzle of my gun into his ribs. He looked straight ahead and done what I told him to. If he was scared bad he didn't let on.
"I haven't got any gun," says he after a while. "I don't pack one."
"I haven't packed one for years myself," says I. "Sometimes a man has to pack one for coyotes and such things," says I.
He got kind of red in his face, but he didn't say anything.
"I'm just that kind of a man—when it comes to a show-down I don't care what happens," says I. "And I reckon you see it's a show-down now. Tell me where she is."