“Blamed if I do.”
“That gray rock off thar; looks jest like a gray rock, anyhow. It’s her umbreller. She’s squattin behind it, waiting fer me to show myself. She’ll hold us hyer till Cody’s crowd comes up. It’s her game. She thinks she has got me in a hole, and now she has plugged up the hole.”
Tim Benson saw the “gray rock,” when Gorilla Jake pointed it out to him; but even then could hardly believe that the gray object was not a rock.
“If it’s an umbrella, a bullet through it ought to get Bill Betts,” he said.
“Which goes ter show that you don’t know her. She is layin’ off to one side, prob’ly, wi’ a rock coverin’ her, er coverin’ her head and shoulders, so a bullet through ther umbreller wouldn’t git her.”
He worked a little higher, even at a risk, and tried to look round. He was perspiring profusely, and his gray eyes glittered; while his lips, drawn back, revealed his fanglike teeth. More than ever he resembled an ape or gorilla, rather than a man.
Tim Benson was not slow in perceiving the desperate character of the situation. Bottled up in the hole by that deadly air rifle, what was to hinder the pretended woman from keeping them there until Buffalo Bill’s party could come up? That would mean Benson’s capture, as well as Gorilla Jake’s.
He drew back his head and studied the stones at the rear of the hole. Then he looked at the long arms of the man-ape, and his powerful shoulders. Benson himself was a small man; but this giant at his side might do the thing he could not. He could furnish the brains which Gorilla Jake lacked, and the man-ape could furnish the muscle which he lacked. It was, it seemed, a fortunate combination.
“If you’ve got the courage, Jake,” he said, “there’s no reason why, with your strength, you can’t push those two stones out of the way back there. It would furnish us a means to get out of this hole.”
Gorilla Jake stared at the stones, licking his hairy lips.