“They wanted the whole hog instead of being contented with their share, and tried two or three times to get this fellow—er—Brown. When Brown wised up to what was going on he thought at first he’d have to pull out to save his hide. But just in time 132 he doped out a scheme to stop their dirty work, and it sure was a slick one, all right.”
Buck chuckled retrospectively. Though the pause was unbroken by any questions, he saw that he had the complete and undivided attention of his audience.
“What he did,” resumed Stratton, “was to write out a detailed account of all the things they’d tried to put across, one of which was an attempt to—a—shoot him in his bunk while he was asleep. He sealed that up in an envelope and sent it to the sheriff with a note asking him to keep it safe, but not to open it unless the writer, Brown, got bumped off in some violent way or disappeared, in which case the sheriff was to act on the information in it and nab the crooks. After he’d got word of its receipt, he up and told the others what he’d done. Pretty cute, wasn’t it?”
The brief pause that followed was tense and fraught with suppressed emotion.
“Did it work?” McCabe at length inquired, with elaborate casualness.
“Sure. The gang didn’t dare raise a finger to him. They might have put a bullet through him any time, or a knife, and made a safe get-away, but then they’d have had to desert the claims, which wasn’t their game at all. Darn good stunt to remember, ain’t it, if a person ever got up against that sort of thing?”
There was no direct reply to the half-question, and 133 Buck shot a glance at his companions. Lynch rode slightly behind him and was out of the line of vision. McCabe, with face averted, bent over fussing with his saddle-strings. The sight of Doc Peters’s face, however, pale, strained, with wide, frightened eyes and sagging jaw, told Stratton that his thrust had penetrated as deeply as he could have hoped.
“We’ll start here.”
It was Lynch’s voice, curt and harsh, that broke the odd silence as he jerked his horse up and dismounted. “Get yore tools out an’ don’t waste any time.”
There was no mistaking his mood, and in the hours that followed he was a far from agreeable taskmaster. He snapped and growled and swore at them impartially, acting generally like a bear with a sore ear whom nothing can please. If he could be said to be less disagreeable to anyone, it was, curiously enough, Bud Jessup, whom he kept down at one end of the line most of the afternoon. Later Stratton discovered the reason.