On the rough table a one-wick lamp shed light over the usual litter of a small freight-office. These days there was little real business. Only a few barrels and bundles stood with the dynamite against the back wall. Crossing the room, Jake pried off the lids, then, while the agent watched him with fearful eyes, he carried and piled the boxes in a solid block close to the table. That done, he returned to the larger window.
Beyond the tracks the plains ran off and away under the moonlight. Northward a cloud of steam hung over the cut, cloaking the salvage of dead and wounded from the wreck. From it issued an occasional cry, command, mutter of voices. Raising his rifle, he sighted into the midst, then dropped it again.
“’Tain’t square, shooting wounded.” But there was no pity in his eyes. His mouth drew into a hard grin as he muttered: “I’d like to know jest how many I got! Must have been a tidy mess. Well, well! look who’s here!”
It was a bullet that had flattened against the stone lintel. His quick eye had picked the flash out of a bunch of chaparral a couple of hundred yards away, and he searched the patch with sweeping muzzle emptying the chamber along its front. Then he waited. But came no answer.
“Afraid I’ve spoiled another of your colleagues.” He turned to the agent. “They ain’t very keen, anyway. You Mexes like a sure thing. It’s a cinch they’re not a-going to try anything till the moon goes down, an’ I simply kain’t waste any more of my valuable time on them. You kin keep watch, Alberto.”
Seating himself at the table, he produced the pack he always carried and laid out the first cards in a game of solitaire. As he played game after game Jake’s brow puckered, the corners of his mouth loosened and tightened again in accordance with the fluctuations of his luck. He could not have been more interested, absorbed if, instead of playing with fate on the edge of the grave, he were cleaning out cowboys in a frontier bunk-house.
In the eyes of the Mexican, watching fearfully, the cold, grim face loomed in the yellow lamplight, a mask of terror. Yet his fright held him the more closely to his work. Not a leaf stirred in the brush, puff of dust raised under the night wind, without his notice; and while he watched the darkening plains one second, the grim, hard face under the gold of the lamp the next, Jake played steadily on, played till, having compassed her circle, the moon rolled down to the horizon and hung poised, a huge silver ball, on the tip of a far-off peak.
Rising, then, he walked to the large window, threw the shutters and looked out over the plains, dim and mysterious in the fading light. A stir of movement, buzz of voices, told of the attack that was preparing in the chaparral behind the station. The hard line of his mouth curled in derision, but as his gaze traveled northward to where the black peak now pierced the bright face of the moon its contempt faded.
Lee’s face, whitely anxious for him, was in his mind, the thrill of her arms around his neck, when he murmured, “On’y thirty miles to the border, a clean getaway.”
Ranging southward again, his glance brought up on the dim, dark range that marked Sliver’s last stand. Once more Jake saw him lying, face turned up, among the rocks. But the vision brought no grief. His small nod expressed merely approbation. Till the moon went out and darkness settled over the plains he stood there, thinking; stood till, with a sharp ping! a bullet whistled past his ear. Then, after closing the shutters, he returned to the table—not any too soon; for as he sat down and picked up the cards came the crash of a volley fired at short range, the splitting and splintering of bullet-pierced shutters.