Billy Winch, headlong, stopping his horse with a sudden pluck of the reins when the gaunt roan had come near setting his four flickering hoofs in their midday fire, chose to ignore the fact that the Timber-Wolf was not alone.
But Standing, springing up, strode out to meet him, his mien anything but friendly.
"Damn you, Billy Winch," he muttered between his teeth, too low for the wondering Lynette to hear. She, too, had sprung up and stood leaning against the valiant pine-tree, wondering swiftly how this latest happening, the coming of Billy Winch into the wild-wood, was to affect her.
Billy Winch, as gay-hearted a rascal as ever stumped on one leg or rode a wild, half-broken horse in carelessly lopsided fashion, laughed gleefully.
"Ho, Timber!" he cried. "If I was a whole man, 'stead of half a one, I'd just jump down and naturally beat you to death! Bein' what I am, all carved to thunder, you're too much all gone to proud flesh to jerk me out of the saddle to stomp on me! So I got the age on you! And I asks you, Johnny Wolf, man-eater, how's tricks?"
"By God, Winch!" Standing in upstarting wrath had the roan horse by the bit, shoving it back with one savage hand so that it fell back on its haunches. "Just because I've stood a lot off you...."
"Slow does it, Timber!" cried Winch. "This is business. I've got a man back there, just out of sight, ready to go clean crazy unless he can have a word with you. To put a name to him ... well, then, Mexicali Joe!"
Now Standing, deep down within him, knew why Billy Winch had come. Never did more faithful heart beat in human breast than that heart thrumming away beneath Billy Winch's faded blue shirt. Winch, having always a shrewd guess where to find his chief, when Standing took it upon himself to disappear from headquarters, had caught at the first excuse to come in person and make sure with his own keen eyes that all went well with a man whom many hated and whom he, above all men, loved.
"Hang Mexicali Joe to the first stout limb you come to!"
Lynette, of impulses ungovernable, could have broken into laughter. For the amazing thing was that what Bruce Standing, impatient almost to fury, said he meant. He had suffered enough inconvenience at Mexicali Joe's hands; he wanted nothing of the man nor of his dross of gold.