“Would that make very much difference in the way he felt about it?”
Jeffries, with an effort, laughed. “That’s all right, Henry! They won’t get you.” Again he extended his finger dogmatically: “If I thought they would, I wouldn’t send you down there.”
“Thank you.”
“You are young, ambitious: four thousand a year isn’t hanging from every telegraph-pole; it is almost twice what they are paying me.”
“You’re not getting shot at.”
“No man, Henry, knows the hour of his death. No man in the high country knows when he is to be made a target––that you well understand. Men are shot down in this country that have no more idea of getting killed than I have––or you have.”
“Don’t include me. I have a pretty good idea of getting killed right away––the minute I take this job.”
“We have temporized with this Calabasas outfit long enough,” declared Jeffries, dropping his mask at last. “Deaf Sandusky, Logan, and that squint-eyed thief, Dave Sassoon––all hold-up men, every one of them! Henry, I’m putting you in on that job because you’ve got nerve, because you can shoot, because I don’t think they can get you––and paying you a whaling big salary to straighten things out along the Spanish Sinks. Do you know, Henry––” Jeffries leaned forward and lowered his tone. Master of the art of persuading and convincing, of hammering and pounding, of swaying the doubting and deciding the undecided, the strong-eyed mountain-man looked his best as he held the younger man under his 14 spell. “Do you know,” he repeated, “I suspect that Morgan Gap bunch are really behind and beneath a lot of this deviltry around Calabasas? You take Gale Morgan: why, he trains with Dave Sassoon; take his uncle, Duke: Sassoon never is in trouble but what Duke will help him out.” Jeffries exploded with a slight but forcible expletive. “Was there ever a thief or a robber driven into Morgan’s Gap that didn’t find sympathy and shelter with some of the Morgans? I believe they are in every game pulled on the Thief River stages.”
“As bad as that?”