"You bet I have!" Hammond chuckled. "When you'd knocked the goggles off me and we recognized each other—hell! I felt like a boob."
Gramont smiled. "How many places had you robbed up to then? Three, wasn't it?"
"Three is right, cap'n," was the unashamed response.
"We haven't referred to it very often, but now things have happened." Gramont's face took on harsh lines of determination. "Do you know, it was a lucky thing that you had no chance to dispose of the jewels and money you obtained? But I suppose you didn't call it good luck at the time."
"No chance?" snorted the other. "No chance is right, cap'n! And I was sore, too. Say, they got a ring of crooks around this town you couldn't bust into with grenades! I couldn't figure it out for a while, but only the other day I got the answer. Listen here, and I'll tell you something big."
Hammond leaned forward, lowered his voice, and tamped at his pipe.
"When I was a young fellow I lived in a little town up North—I ain't sayin' where. My old man had a livery stable there, see? Well, one night a guy come along and got the old man out of bed, and slips him fifteen hundred for a rig and a team, see? I drove the guy ten miles through the hills, and set him on a road he wanted to find.
"Now, that guy was the biggest crook in the country in them days—still is, I guess. He was on the dead run that night, to keep out o' Leavenworth. He kep' out, all right, and he's settin' in the game to this minute. Nobody never pinched him yet, and never will."
Gramont's face had tensed oddly as he listened. Now he shot out a single word:
"Why?"