Rhodes cut the third time, then stared and whistled.
“The cards are stacked by the Indian! All three covered with war paint. What’s the use in a poor stray white bucking against that?”
He picked out the cards and placed them side by side, ace, king and queen of hearts.
“Three aces could beat them,” suggested Pike. “Go on Bub, shuffle them up, don’t be a piker.”
Rhodes did, and cut ten of clubs.
“Not even the right color,” he lamented. “Nothing less than two aces for salvation, and I––don’t––get––them!”
A lonely deuce fell on the sand, and Rhodes eyed it sulkily as he rolled a cigarette.
“You poor little runt,” he apostrophized the harmless two-spot. “You’ve kicked me out of the frying pan into the fire, and a good likely blaze at that!”
“Don’t reckon I care to go any deeper into trouble than what we’ve found,” decided Pike. “Ordinary Indian scraps are all in the day’s work––same with a Mexican outfit––but, Bub, this slave-hunting graft game with the state soldiery doing the raiding is too strong a combine for two lone rangers to buck against. Me for the old U. S. border, and get some of this devilish word to the peace advocates at home.”
“They wouldn’t believe you, and only about two papers along the border would dare print it,” observed Rhodes. “Every time a band of sunny Mexicans loot a ranch or steal women, the word goes north that again the bloodthirsty Yaquis are on the warpath! Those poor devils never leave their fields of their own will, and don’t know why the Americans have a holy dread of them. Yet the Yaqui is the best worker south of the line.”