He made a move as if to part the tent-wall behind him.
“Hold on!” said the doctor, snatching off his goggles and pushing up the brim of his hat. “I’ve got another score to settle with you, Shanklin. Do you know me now?”
Shanklin didn’t wait to reply. He dropped to his knees just as Slavens reached for him, catching the collar of his coat. In an instant the gambler was gone, but his coat was in Dr. Slavens’ hand, a circumstance from which the assembled men drew a great deal of merriment.
The chief of police, remiss in his high duty, should have been there to sustain Shanklin’s hand, according to their gentlemanly agreement when the partnership was formed. He arrived too late. Shanklin was gone, and from the turmoil in the tent the chief concluded that he had trimmed somebody in his old-fashioned, comfortable way. So his duty, as he saw it in that moment, lay in clearing them out and dispersing them, and turning deaf ears to all squeals from the shorn and skinned.
Dr. Slavens and his friend had nothing to linger for. They were the first to leave, the doctor carrying Shanklin’s coat under his arm, the pockets of his own greasy makeshift bulging with more money than he ever had felt the touch of before. As they hurried 163 along the dark street away from the scene of their triumph, the little man with fiery whiskers did the talking.
“Mackenzie is my name,” said he, all of the suspicion gone out of him, deep, feeling admiration in its place, “and if you was to happen up to southern Montana you’d find me pretty well known. I’ve got fifty thousand sheep on the range up there, average four dollars a head, and I’d hand half of ’em over to you right now if you’d show me how you turned that trick. That was the slickest thing I ever saw!”
“It wouldn’t do you any good at all to know how it was done,” said Slavens, “for it was a trick for the occasion and the man we worked it on. The thing for us to do is to go to some decent, quiet place and divide this money.”
“Give me my two hundred and the stake,” said Mackenzie, “and keep the rest. I don’t need money; I’ve got two national banks full of it up there in Montana now.”
“Lord knows I need it!” said the doctor, beginning to sweat over the nearness to visions which he once believed he should never overhaul.
He stepped along so fast in his eagerness to come up with and lay hands on them that Mackenzie was thrown into a trot to keep up.