Rust seemed to take diabolical glee in building a small fire of the driest twigs he could find. So expert was he at this that Childress' suspicion was aroused. Doubtless both Rust and Roper had been brand-blotters in their time. But small service did suspicion do him in the present emergency.
Horrible to think of was the punishment which Murdock, as foreman and obvious chief of the trio, seemed to have accepted. That they would not burn him deep enough to endanger his life he felt certain. There was some doubt in their suspicions or they would have shot him down at sight. But to go through life with a horseshoe scar on his forehead, even though later he brought prison punishment to all concerned in the operation, seemed insupportable. The certain pain of the branding did not trouble him so much. In the service he had suffered as much as a man can suffer and live to remember in his nightmares. The resultant trace of a bullet wound would not have been so bad; he had several tucked around his exceedingly vital body and at least one leaden slug bedded down where surgeons of the Royal did not care to probe for it. But a brand! He remembered the Scarlet letter of the old Puritans and the crime brands which certain nations of Europe put upon particular criminals. The situation was insupportable; yet he would not weaken—he'd be damned if he would.
Preparations went on apace, with him watching every move. As if nothing more important than the frying of morning bacon had been on the bill, he heard Roper give Rust a "call" for not building a hot enough fire and making so much smoke about it that some of the Silver Horse gang might get wise and take a pot shot at them. Rust flared at the aspersion and told Roper to go "plum'" to where it was "hotter," on the theory that he was going there anyway.
While they were quarreling, the sergeant called to Murdock. The eagerness with which the foreman responded possibly indicated that the foreman was losing his nerve and his desire for the particular punishment which the box canyon was to cloak. An average man would have taken a tip from this alacrity, made the confession under demand and denied it when again able to fight his own battles. But Sergt. Jack Childress was not an average man. Never had he compromised, and he was not ready to do so now. They could burn him if they dared, but they could not make him weaken and they could not force him to give up his quest in the Fire Weed.
"Mind lighting my pipe for me while they're heating the iron?" he asked, as casually as he might have asked for a match in the Strathconna Club. "The pipe's in my breast pocket and it don't need to be filled."
Dick Murdock took a startled backward step. The nerve of the man! And he was not thinking of nerve in the derisive sense. He had that same sort of nerve, to a degree; but he doubted if it would have carried him through such an impossible situation as that in which the horse thief—and he honestly believed the rider of the silver beast to be one—now found himself.
"Don't you ever weaken?" he asked.
"Why weaken, when there's nothing to be weak about?"
"We're going to brand you."
"That don't kill, and even if it did, death's only an experiment into something no one knows anything about."