“I had a mind to wake you by shooting a button off your coat, just to see if that would do the business,” said his host, smiling pleasantly, as he handed Tuttle the flask which had done duty the night before. “I reckon you’re about the soundest sleeper I ever saw.”
By daylight Tuttle saw that the man was well along in middle life and that his face was smoothly shaven. Tuttle himself looked to be less than thirty years old. He was tall, broad of shoulder and big of girth, with large hands and great, round, well-muscled wrists that told of arms like limbs of oak and of legs like iron pillars.
The young man ate his breakfast alone, his captor standing near by and talking pleasantly with him, but holding alertly a shot-gun at half cock, while crouching behind a bunch of greasewood was the Mexican with a drawn pistol in his hands. As Tuttle mounted, the tall man called out sternly:
“Hold up your hands!”
Tuttle hesitated for a moment, looking at him in surprise.
“I mean it!” and the trigger of his shot-gun clicked to full cock. Tuttle’s hands went up quickly. The man came beside him and buckled on his cartridge belt, with the revolver in its holster. Then he backed to his own horse, mounted it, and leveled his shot-gun at Tuttle’s breast.
“Now you can take down your hands and go,” he said. “But remember that I’m ridin’ behind you, ready to bang a hole through your head if you make the first motion toward your gun, or anything happens that ain’t straight. I’ll put you on the road to Plumas, and then I want you to make tracks, for we’ve got no time to waste.”
As they rode away, Tuttle could hear the hoof beats of two horses and knew that both men were following. After a few miles the tall man called to Tuttle to halt and said, pointing to a road that wound a white line across the distance:
“That’s your road over there, and you can go on, now alone. But I want you to remember that I’m here watchin’ you, with two loads of buckshot and six of lead, and every one of them is goin’ plumb through you if you ain’t square. You’ve been a gentleman so far, and dead game, and I’m proud to ’ve met you, Mr. Thomson Tuttle. If it ever comes my way to treat you whiter than I have this time, I’ll be glad to do it. Good-bye, sir.”