“Oh!” Polly gasped again. No one had ever spoken to her quite like this before. “You can’t go unarmed, can you?”
“Never mind me. You stay here till I come for you. If anybody bothers you, you shoot. Understand?”
“Yes, I do.”
Scott proceeded to climb cautiously out of the arroyo and in a moment was out of Polly’s sight. He looked back once and saw the girl standing where he had left her, holding the reins of the two horses, her eyes big with excitement, watching his every movement. He waved his hand, then turned his back upon her.
“That’s a good youngster,” he said to himself. “Plenty of spunk but knows when to mind. I’m afraid that if I was ten years younger I might make a fool of myself—for she’d never look at me.”
The spot at which he had left the sheltering arroyo was two or three hundred feet from the cabin in which he was living with Hard and Adams. His idea was to steal into the house from the rear, arm himself, and then see what he could do, though, of course, he realized that their small force could do little against Pachuca, who not only had some twenty-five or thirty men of his own, but who could easily count on the Mexicans who worked on the place.
As he walked quickly in the direction of the house, he noticed Pachuca, for he it was on the sorrel horse, giving orders loudly in Spanish to his men who were scattered around the place—many of them down at the corral. He did not see any of his own people, which puzzled him a little. As he entered his cabin and crossed the living-room to go to the bedroom, where he kept an extra gun, he nearly stumbled over the body of a man.
It was Adams, lying in the middle of the room, dead—or had the boy only fainted? Scott rummaged in the cupboard for the whiskey bottle and poured a bit of the liquor down his throat. Jimmy opened his eyes and stared dizzily around. Scott saw that the floor around him was covered with blood.
“What is it, boy? Those hounds shoot you?” he demanded. Adams grinned shakily.
“You’ve hit it, brainy one,” he muttered. “Help me into a chair, Scotty, I ain’t dead, only winged in the left hin’ leg.”