"Then you have no idea what it amounts to yet?" I asked.
"No," said he. "You know it will neither increase nor diminish with waiting."
"But why did you wait?"
"O," he said lightly, "if a man cannot wait for his partner getting well, and do the thing ship-shape, he must be very impatient."
"You don't seem anxious, even, to know what you are really worth."
"I fear not," said he. "O, man, can't you see that once we know, to a five-cent piece, what all that loot is worth, we are through with the adventure and there's no more fun to be had? I'm never happy when I get a thing. It's in the hunting that I find relief."
But there fell a shadow on his face then.
I asked him if Miss Pinkerton was still in Baker City. I declare, he blushed at the very mention of her name. I could see the red tinge the brown of his cheeks.
I often wondered, when Apache Kid spoke, just what he was really thinking. He did not always say what he thought, or believe what he said. He had a way, too, of giving turns to his phrases that might have given him a name for a hardness that was not really his.
"O," he said, "she heard that you were ill and wanted to come and look after you, but you were babbling not just of green fields, exactly—you were babbling of Hell—and I can never get over a foolish idea that early in youth was pumped into me that women do not know about Hell and should not know. I thought it advisable to prevent her coming to see you—and hear you."