"I'm with you, if you'll have me."
"I'd sooner have your horse," he remarked, shifting the quid of tobacco in his cheek.
"You can't have her without me, unless you steal her," I said.
"Git your gun, then, and shove some grub into your pockets: I can't wait for nobody." He swung himself into the saddle.
"What road do you take?"
"There ain't but one," he shouted, and pointed straight ahead.
I overtook him easily within the hour; he was saving his horse, for this was his last chance to change until Champagne Station, fifty miles away.
He gave me rather a cynical smile of recognition as I ranged alongside, as if to say, "You'll probably get enough of this before we are through." The horses settled down to their work, and they "humped theirselves," as Maverick put it, in the cool hours before sunrise.
At daybreak his awful face struck me all afresh, as inscrutable in its strange distortion as some stone god in the desert, from whose graven hideousness a thousand years of mornings have silently drawn the veil.
"What do you want those fellows for?" I asked, as we rode. I had taken for granted that we were hunting suspects of the road-agent persuasion.