"Well, that's straight enough talk, I guess," said Donoghue. "Is the deal on?"
My financial condition itself was such as to preclude any doubt. Had I been told plainly that it was to the Lost Cabin Mine we were going and been offered a share in it I would, remembering Apache Kid and Donoghue of the verandah, as I may put it, in distinction from Apache Kid and Donoghue of to-night—well, I would have feared that some heated sudden turn of mind of one or the other or both of these men might prevent me coming into my own. Donoghue especially had a fearsome face to see. But there was no such suggestion. I was offered two hundred dollars and, now that the night fell and the silence deepened and the long range of hills gloomed on us, I thought I could understand that the presence of a third man might be well worth two hundred dollars to two men of very alien natures among the silence and the loneliness that would throw them together closely whether they would or not.
"The deal is on," I said.
We shook hands solemnly then and Donoghue looked toward Apache Kid as though all the programme was not yet completed. Apache Kid nodded and produced a roll of bills. The light was waning and he held them close to him as he withdrew one.
"That'll make us square again," he said, handing me the roll. "I 've kept off a five; so now we 're not obliged to each other for anything."
And then, as though to seal the compact and bear in upon me a thought of the expedition we were going upon, the sun disappeared behind the western hills and from somewhere out there, in the shadows and deeper shadows of the strange piled landscape, came a long, faint sound, half bay, half moan. It was the dusk cry of the mountain coyotes; and either the echo of it or another cry came down from the hills beyond the city, only the hum of which we heard there. And when that melancholy cry, or echo, had ended, a cold wind shuddered across the land; all that loneliness, that by day seemed to lure one ever with its sunlit peaks and its blue, meditative hollows, seemed now a place of terrors and strange occurrences; but the lure was still there, only a different lure,—a lure of terror and darkness instead of romance and sunlight.
CHAPTER VI
Farewell to Baker City
e all came to our feet then, Apache Kid carefully flicking the sand from his clothing.