"Watch it, Thor!... Lie down, Thor!"
And Thor, though he growled, lay down.... And his wolfish eyes now were upon the plate and its spilled contents rather than upon her.
"If I can but have time!" Lynette was telling herself excitedly. "If only I can have time ... I can make that dog do what I say to do!... God, give me time!"
When Bruce Standing, rushing through the forest land, came upon them ... Taggart and the others ... they were grouped about a despairing, hopeless Mexicali Joe. For Mexicali Joe's amigo, the great Timber-Wolf, in whom next to God he put all trust, had failed him. And Joe had come to the end of his tether, the end of lies and excuses and empty explanations. And now Taggart, as brutal a man as ever wore the badge of the law, was impatient, and meant to make an end of all procrastinations. It was his intention to give Mexicali Joe such a "third degree" as never any man had lived to experience before to-night. Rage, chagrin, disappointment, and natural, innate brutality spurred him on. Even Young Gallup, who was no chicken-hearted man at best, demurred; but Taggart cursed him off and told him to hold his tongue, and planned matters to his own liking.
"Jim Taggart's got Injun blood in him, you know," muttered Gallup uneasily to Cliff Shipton ... as though that might explain anything.
Even to such as Young Gallup, a man of whose humanity little was to be said, explanations were logical requirements. For Jim Taggart was at his evil worst. With cruelly hard fist he had knocked the little Mexican down; before Joe could get to his feet he booted him; when Joe stood, tottering, Taggart knocked him down again, jarring the quivering flame of life within him. And only at that did Jim Taggart, a man of no imagination but of colossal brutality, count that he was beginning. Then it was that Joe cried out; that his scream pierced through the night's stillness; that he pleaded with Taggart, saying:
"This time, I tell you the true! I tell you ever'thing...."
"You're damned right you will," shouted Taggart, beside himself with his long baffled rage. "When I get good and ready to listen. And I'm not listening now, you Mexico pup! First you go through hell, and then I'll know that you tell the truth! Fool with me, would you; with me, Jim Taggart? You——"
Then Taggart began his third degree, listening to neither Joe's pleadings nor yet to the voice of Young Gallup.