The Indian offered no opposition as Lee tackled him. He couldn’t—he was beyond all that—he was so full of dead-eye it was oozing out by the pores. He just sat there, and Lee slid him to the door just as he was, still sitting, and dropped him out. He struck the ground with a thud, rebounded a foot, rolled over, grunted, and lay like a log. There was a guffaw from the camp stragglers, and a deep and envious chorus of “Ughs!” from the “blankets.”
No, I’m not joking—it’s a long way from a joke, as you’ll see. They were envious. It acted like a red rag on a bull—the possibility of attaining the condition, the state of heavenly bliss, that had been reached by their red brother, do you understand?
Clancy wasn’t laughing. He stood where Perley had left him, sullen and with twitching face. I don’t know, I think it was Perley’s sheer nerve that kept the halfbreed from drawing and shooting the conductor when his back was turned. I don’t know—brute beast cowed by the human mind, perhaps. No one ever knew Breed Clancy. He had his yellow streak at times, and then again the blood that was in him made him worse than a frenzied madman. Yes, I guess it was a case of “brute” all right, for there was no cowing him when the frenzy was on him.
Perley wasn’t laughing, either. He was opening and shutting his watch impatiently. “Come on! Come on!” he cried at Lee. “Get those barrels out. We’ve got to cross Number Two at the Creek. It’ll be the carpet for ours if we hold her up.”
Lee grabbed the broached cask and edged it toward the doorway. The contents slopped and sloshed inside as he moved it, and occasionally a little of the stuff would spill out through the bunghole. Then, somehow, just as he got it to the door, his hold slipped, out it went, bounded on the edge of the ties, and then went down the embankment right into the hands of those squatting “blankets.” They didn’t squat long; I don’t need to tell you that. They were on it in a mob, and they got the taste—they’d had the smell—and the fill was to come presently.
Clancy was cursing in streams; and no fouler-mouthed man than Clancy ever lived. He tried once to get the Indians off the barrel, and the stragglers backed him up half-heartedly. You might as well have tried to move that mogul on the pit there behind you. He didn’t try but once, then he fell back on cursing again, and Perley was the target for most of it.
Perley? He never answered him, but his face grew harder and harder—and his gun was in his hand again. “Throw out those other two barrels!” he snapped at Lee.
“The redskins will get every last drop if I do,” objected Lee, hesitating.
“Owner’s risk. We’ve no station here. Throw ‘em out!” repeated Perley, grimmer than before, only this time loud enough for Clancy to hear him.
“Ye do,” roared the half-breed, “ye do, an’ I’ll worse than murdher ye one of these——”