“Oh, only that the revenue people would a good deal rather have the ‘others’ you speak of—the men further up the creek and the men behind them—than to have you.”
“I reckon they would, but what’s that got to do with it?”
“Only that if you made up your mind to turn Government’s witness and give the whole snap away; they’d be pretty apt to let you off easily.”
The man sat silent for a time. At last he muttered:
“First place, I don’t know enough. Them fellers ain’t no fools an’ they ain’t a-lettin’ fellers like me into their secrets. I ain’t never seed any of ’em, ‘ceptin’ the storekeeper up that away what takes the stuff from us, an’ pays us little enough for gittin’ it there. ’Sides that, them fellers has got money an’ lots o’ sense. Even ef I know’d all about it an’ ef I give it away, ’twould be only the wuss for me. They’d have me follered to the furdest corner o’ the earth an’ killed like a dog at last. No, ’tain’t no use. I’ve got to take my medicine. Time for runnin’ away is past, an’ I ain’t got but one good leg to run with, you see.”
“What made you lame, anyhow?” asked Tom, by way of keeping up the conversation without seeming too insistent on his suggestion that the man should confess.
“That bully with the red face—our captain, as he calls hisself. He kicked my hip out’n jint one day when I was drunk, an’ seein’s they wa’nt no doctor anywheres about, he sot it hisself, an’ sot it wrong somehow. Anyhow, I’d like to do him up if I could.”
Tom noted the remark and the vindictive tone in which it was made, but he did not reply to it at once. Instead, he said:
“They must pay him better than they do the rest of you?”
“Him? You bet! He gits a lot out’n the business, an’ he’s got dead oodles and scads o’ money put away in the bank. He’s close in with the big ones what’s backin’ the game. It was him what set it up fust off—leastways him an’ Pedro Mendez.”