Strang soon returned with a box of really excellent cigars and an unbroken package of cards. The former he had secured at the "Palace" bar, Coogan's weeds being the best in the city, a thing characteristic of all gambling hells whose whiskey and tobacco is always unexceptionable, but the cards he bought at the little drug store across the way. He had reason to be suspicious of the ornately-backed pasteboards affected by the Coogan establishment.
In the combined gambling hall and bar adjacent to the private room, four Lazy K cowpunchers were languidly lounging about with disconsolation written all over their faces; but Strang's orders had been imperative, so they had to content themselves with smoking innumerable cigarettes and hoping that something might occur to enliven the monotony of their vigil.
"It's up to yuh mugs to see that nobody gets offishus an' interrupts thu perceedin's!" had been his instructions; nevertheless they irresistibly gravitated toward the door of the private room, where they stood with thumbs hooked in their belts in suggestive proximity to the butts of their peacemakers.
Somehow the atmosphere was charged with expectancy and a strange constraint had fallen on the usually boisterous throng. Something unusual was taking place in that private room, but Big Bart's privacy was a thing not healthy to violate; and then again there was something peculiarly discouraging to idle curiosity in the grim faces of the bronzed quartet just outside the door. There was not a man in that assemblage who would not have given half of his hoard for one peep into that room, and similarly there was not a man of them who for thrice that consideration would have essayed such a breach of etiquette.
And up at the county jail another of the Lazy K outfit was cursing his luck and sarcastically requesting a horde of wretches in the basement dungeons to "holler a few, so's I kin use up a bunch o' these damn hulls. Holler just oncet!"
In an unlighted room on the second story of the little hotel four short blocks away, a woman sat crouched behind the curtains of a window which commanded fully the Palace saloon. She was still dressed in the inconspicuous dark robe in which she had watched the sadly aborted attempt at the jail a short half-hour before. Feverishly had she witnessed the stealthy approach of the scant dozen of slinking forms which had silently stolen into the frowning portals which had accommodatingly opened for their ingress; breathlessly had she waited until there came the sound of savage oaths, muffled thuds and the clamor of men in mortal combat. She had almost screamed in frantic apprehension as the invading force had been suddenly reinforced by four other figures with gleaming weapons in their hands. She would have called out warning of this new and terrible peril to the now certainly doomed prisoners, but her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth and she only sobbed and swayed in hysterical rage at the balking of her revenge. But suddenly to her amazement there came forth seven men clad in vaquero costume, who laughed boisterously and shot their revolvers aimlessly into the air. She gave a sharp gasp of relief as she heard a familiar voice say with unfeigned regret:
"Why, I've hed moah fun at a dawg fite! D'yuh reckon that theah was evah ary white man, ceptin' he were sick er asleep, that passed in his chips to sech a passd o' pulin' polecats like this yeah bunch we've jes' been bendin' ouah guns ovah? Gawd! Ken, I'll stink o' gawlic fer a week! Ef Coogan don't put up a betah scrap by hes lonesome than hes whole pack o' peccaries did, why, I'm goin' to swap my ole hawg laig fer a putty blowah an' hiah out on a sheep ranch whar they's suthin' doin'!"
And now she was waiting, waiting with a fierce impatience that bruised the soft taper fingers gripping the jeweled hilt of a slender cuchilla hidden in her bosom, waiting for the vicious crackle that would mercifully appease the maddening insistence of those two dead men calling from their graves in far-off Ameca.
For the greater part of an hour she shivered in an ecstasy of expectation and fear. "Mother of God! What if they should let him escape after all!" Clutching her stiletto, she ran vengefully out into the night.