“Miss Huntington, I’d sorter like you to know that I ain’t near’s bad as they tell it around. I ain’t never killed a man—wounded ’em, yes, an’ only jest when I had to. An’ with all I’ve got away with, I’m next thing to broke this minute. That’s honest——”
“But you held up the paymaster’s car last night, didn’t you?” she interrupted.
“Yes’m. But I didn’t hold onto the money, bein’ wounded, an’ Warburton——”
“What was in your saddlebags that you said you couldn’t afford to lose?”
“My mother’s pitcher, some clothes, an’ a lot of leetle doodads I’m keepin’. I always have ’em along with me. But I want to tell you ag’in that I ain’t fergettin’ yore kindness. You’re goin’ to hear from me, Miss Huntington, some time. An’—an’ I hope you’ll be proud, like you jest said.”
Dot crept down the steps shortly afterward, shut the barn door behind her, and darted across the moonlit yard. Climbing back into her room she cautiously lowered the window. Then, with a sigh of relief and satisfaction, she went to bed. For the remainder of the night, she lay wide-eyed, snug in the bewitching embraces of romance and imagination.
Following her departure, Billy Gee remained in the hayloft for a long interval and leisurely ate the food she had brought him. Periodically, he looked at his watch by the aid of a moonbeam streaming in through a crack in the boards. When one o’clock came, he got carefully to his feet, took up the roll of blankets, and started downstairs.
From far out on Soapweed Plains, rose the wail-bark of a foraging coyote. There was no other sound. That semiarid land lay mute and mysterious and teaming with tragic potentialities.
“Creepy,” he muttered under his breath. “Reckon I’m a leetle flighty—leaked too much blood.”
He reached the ground floor and noiselessly made his way toward the rear door of the barn, heading for the field and his horse. As he fumbled in the dark for the hasp an invisible figure emerged from under the steps back of him. He felt the sharp dig of a six-shooter between his shoulders. A voice hissed in his ear.