The old guide crept up the granite slope a noiseless shadow, and as he neared the open door of the cabin he crouched with every faculty on the alert, his right hand twitching, eyes slowly searching the faces of the men under the light of a lantern swinging from a beam in the center of the room. Sam raised himself erect and glided noiselessly to the door. There he stood for a full minute, his gaze shifting from one to another of the men gathered there and finally coming to rest on the dark, swarthy face of one who looked to be a Mexican, and whose attitude and peremptory speech plainly showed that he was the leader of the party.
“I’ve been thinkin’. The boy’ll be home prob’ly some time in the morning, but he can’t be ’lowed to git thar. We’ve got to put a man on his trail with a light, bad as it be to do thet, an’ run him down afore he gits thar. Bad-Eye, it’s up to you to do the job, an’ if ye do it right, the boy’ll be a dead dude by mornin’. If he ain’t I’ll go git him myself, fer he ain’t no good.”
“I reckon ye lie!”
It was a thunderbolt, hurled at them by Sam Conifer from the doorway, and half a dozen hands flew to as many revolver holsters.
“Put ’em back!”
The command was uttered with an incisiveness that cut like a keen-edged blade, and the hands of the mountain ruffians sagged away from their holsters ever so little.
“I’ve got somethin’ to say to ye cayuses fust. After I gits finished ye kin shoot. Ye’r a fine bunch of mavericks, ain’t ye?” drawled Sam.
CHAPTER XIX
A DUEL IN THE DARK
Ordinarily long before this every gun in the room would have been trained on the intruder, but something restrained them. Perhaps it was the easy, confident manner of the man in the doorway. Then again, they well knew that a man who would voluntarily face that assemblage, and expect to get away with it, must have supreme confidence in himself. Whether or not that confidence was well placed, they proposed to find out sooner or later.
“I been lookin’ fer ye fellers,” announced Sam. “Now that I’ve found ye we’ll have a little confab, so don’t git smart an’ feel fer yer guns, ’cause somethin’ might happen. This heah right hand o’ mine, though it’s all crinkled up with the rheumatiz, now an’ ag’in gits mighty nervous, an’ it might throw a gun afore I could stop it. Jest like this”: