Sprague met the angry eyes of the engineer and smiled back into them.
“I’ll take it under consideration,” he said, half-jocularly. “You’ll give me a little time to think about it, won’t you?”
Jennings’s hand dropped to the butt of the heavy revolver sagging at his hip.
“Not a damned minute!” he barked. “Hand it over!”
Starbuck was closing up slowly on the opposite side of his companion’s horse, a movement which he brought about by a steady knee pressure on the bronco’s off shoulder. Jennings’s fingers were closing around the grip of his pistol when the astounding thing happened. Without so much as a muscle-twitching of warning Sprague’s left hand shot out, the fingers grappled an ample breast-hold on the engineer’s coat and shirt-bosom, and Jennings was snapped from his feet and flung, back down, across the horn of Sprague’s saddle much as if his big body had been a bag of meal. Starbuck reached over, jerked the engineer’s weapon from its holster, broke it to eject the cartridges, and flung it away.
“Now you can get down,” said Sprague quietly; and when he loosed the terrible clutch, Jennings slid from the saddle-horn and fell, cursing like a maniac.
“Stand still!” ordered Starbuck, when the engineer bounded to his feet and started to run toward the commissary, and the weapon that made the bidding mandatory materialized suddenly from an inner pocket of the ex-cowman’s khaki riding-coat.
But the trouble, it seemed, was just fairly getting under way. Up from the embankment where the scrapers were dumping came two or three foremen armed with pick-handles. The commissary was turning out its quota of rough-looking clerks and time-keepers, and a mob of the foreign laborers—the shift off duty—came pouring out of the bunk houses and shacks.
Sprague had unlimbered and focussed his camera again and was
calmly taking snap-shot after snap-shot.