“I was a fool for ever joinin’ ’em,” he assured himself, groaning over the memory of Snaky Pete’s brutal blow. “He’ll kill me, mebbe, if I foller ’em; and the boys will make sport of me.”
He was beginning to realize that he was not, after all, cut from the same cloth as these outlaws.
He had been wild in the town, had gambled, and got into bad company; and, being tempted one night, he had gone with an acquaintance and joined Snaky Pete’s band of road agents; being assured by his new friend—one of Snaky Pete’s men—that the life led by this band was one long and gay carouse, with plenty of fun—altogether a desirable life for a young man of courage and spirit; who felt the chafing restraint of law and order.
Pool Clayton had been with the band less than a week, and was finding the life anything but what he had pictured it. The men were rougher and coarser and more brutal than he had imagined; and altogether the delightful stir and excitement had not been what he anticipated. Snaky Pete, whom he knew only too well, had been cruelly harsh, and had told him he was a coward and a milksop, and needed “hardening.”
Already there had been several attempts to “harden” him; that is, to brutalize him, from which he had shrunk. This last attempt, however, had gone beyond anything he had dreamed of; when he was ordered to kill a man in cold blood, just as if that man were no more than a wolf. Clayton had not been able to do it; and this was the result—struck senseless to the ground, and abandoned on the lonely prairie.
“Mebbe I’d better go back to the town,” he said; “I ain’t fit for this.”
But back in the town officers were watching for him for some small offense against the law; and he abandoned the thought of doing that when he recalled the fact.
There seemed nothing he could do except follow the outlaws and rejoin them. He believed that long before he could overtake them the old trapper would be murdered and put out of the way, and that murder, at least, would not be forced on him.
“I s’pose I can bear the boys chaffing and joking me,” he mused. “And I reckon I do need hardening, if I’m to keep with ’em, and lead this life. I reckon I am a sort of milksop and weak.”
Yet he could not feel right toward Snaky Pete. A feeling that was murderous burned in his very soul against the brutal outlaw leader.