“How about you?”
“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything—much less at a man. But if I had to——”
“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. But we mustn’t be too blood-thirsty. If we are followed to-night it needn’t be a foregone conclusion that the trailers are going to try to take our mine away from us. It is much more likely they’ll be tagging along to do a little hurry stake-driving of their own, after we’ve shown them the place.”
Philip had drained his second cup of coffee. “If you are through?” he said; and as they left the restaurant he shot a quick glance aside at the man who either was, or was not, a coincidence. To all appearances, suspicion had no peg to hang upon. The Neighbors person was eating his supper quietly, and he did not look up as they passed him on their way to the street.
At the stable they found Drew’s man; a young fellow who looked like a horse-wrangler, and who dressed the part, even to a pair of jingling Mexican spurs with preposterous rowels, and soft leather boots with high heels.
“Everything lovely and the goose hangs high,” he told them; and as they were leading the loaded jacks and the saddle animals out: “The big boss said I was to ride herd on yuh till yuh got out o’ town. He allowed it’d be safer if yuh didn’t go pee-radin’ down the Avenoo.”
In silence they followed their mounted guide through the lower part of the town and so came, by a rather long and dodging detour, into the rutted stage road at some distance beyond the last of the houses. Here their pace-setter turned back and they went on alone. It was a moonless night, but they had no trouble in following the well-used road over the hills and down to the valley of the Arkansas.
At the river crossing, however, the difficulties began. Though hardly more than a mountain creek at this short distance from its source, the river still held hazards in places for a night crossing with loaded pack animals, and it was some little time before they found the shallows through which they had led the burros the previous evening. Just as they reached and recognized the crossing place they heard the sound of galloping hoofs, and Philip jerked his rifle out of its saddle scabbard and began to fumble the breech mechanism.
“Don’t shoot!” Bromley warned; and when the single horseman closed up they saw that he was the guide who had piloted them out of Leadville.
“Sashayed out to tell yuh there’s a bunch a-trailin’ yuh,” he announced laconically. “Five of ’em, with Hank Neighbors headin’ the procession. Must’ve got onto yuh, some way.”