“I haven’t said I was after him, have I?”
“Not to me, you haven’t. And I don’t ask you either to say it or deny it. All I want to say is this: if you go gunning for Vallory, you’ve got to include me. You understand?”
The giant grunted. “Perhaps you’d like to try it out right now?” he suggested.
“As you please,” said Plegg calmly. “I’m heeled, and I know you are. If you think you can get to it quicker than I can, the bars are down.”
This time the “killer’s” grunt lapsed into a chuckle.
“I don’t need a man for breakfast to-morrow morning,” he said. “When I do, I’ll let you know. S’pose you get out o’ the way and let me pass.”
“With pleasure,” snapped Plegg. “Only what I say, goes. If you hit Vallory, you hit me. And it will be safer if you hit me first, and you always know where to find me.”
Judith’s saving interval having thus been bought and paid for, Plegg stood aside and let Dargin have the path. But after he had left the town behind and was plodding across the basin on his way back to the headquarters camp and his long-deferred rest, he was weighing judicially the value of the expedient to which he had resorted. To which extreme of the arc would the pendulum of a woman’s emotions be carried? Would Judith Fallon be true to whatever feeling she still cherished for David Vallory? Or would she refuse to betray the man who, so far as his limitations had permitted, had stood between her and utter degradation?
“I guess it’s on the knees of the gods,” was the first assistant’s final summing-up of the matter; the conclusion reached as he was crossing the yard tracks to the isolated bunk car. “There may be some man living who can tell what a woman will do under given conditions, but the good Lord knows I’m not that man.”
And so leaving it he swung up the steps of the car and crept to his bunk, quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping chief.