“Now, Bob,” Scotty began again, “you may be prejudiced. That aint fair as between friends. You ought to hear both sides. I’m not so bad a man as they make out in this ’ere camp. Fact is, we were all pretty high-strung that night, and a little rumpus oughtn’t to be laid up agin a gentleman who tries to deal square and make an honest livin’. I don’t lay up nothin’ agin Morris. We just pulled pistols on one another as gentlemen will sometimes, ye know, and he got the drop. That’s all. Now a man like me shouldn’t be sent out o’ town for a little thing like that. It’s an outrage, and you know it, Bob.”
“Yes,” the upright Robert assented. “It’s a big outrage. Mor’n that, I b’lieve the boys would see it now, ’n’ nobody’d say a word if you were to go into the El Dorado to-night. I’ll risk it, ’n’ I’ll introduce you as my friend, and then let any one object if he thinks best!”
“There’s one young feller you can’t catch with no chaff like that, and if I get a good chance, I’ll break his head.”
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t know his name, a tall, red-bearded galoot, that looks like a Scotchman. Now I’m part Scotch myself and I admire the way he hit me under the ear, for my country’s sake, but all the same I owe him one!”
“Why, that must be that new pardner of Brehm and Bushwick’s up the creek.”
“Very likely. He’d just come up in the stage and was askin’ after a man o’ that name.”
Describing him to one another, they agreed that Sandy was the object of Scotty’s special aversion. This knock-down incident (into which it is unnecessary to go more particularly) was only one more count against the firm, and a new bond uniting this precious pair of scallawags. How and why Bob hated Max and Lennox we know; for a still better reason the gambler fostered a grudge against Sandy. They needed no oath-taking, therefore, to make them firm allies in any plan which might present itself to get revenge and possible profit; but in respect to the latter point they had deceived themselves into a belief that our young friends had far more money than was really the case.