“That he should treat me that way—he!—when he’d ought to be my best friend! I wouldn’t joined ’em, but fer the fact that I learned he was the leader; and now to have him treat me that way!”
After a while, when he felt better and stronger, he rose from the fire and got his horse. Then he mounted, and rode away in the direction of Poplar Bluffs, the camping place of which he knew.
His evil tendencies, and evil surroundings and past, had conquered again; he meant to rejoin the road agents, and “face the music,” whatever it might be.
CHAPTER VII.
TAUNTS AND JEERS.
Pool Clayton reached Poplar Bluffs, an isolated point on the river, at the foot of a spur of the Sepulcher Mountains, after daylight, but he did not at once venture into the camp. He could not summon up enough courage until he saw a number of outlaws ride away from the camp, and guessed that one of them was Snaky Pete.
When he entered the camp he found but few of the outlaws there, and those few seemed to be under command of a young fellow not much older than himself. This young fellow was a weasel-eyed, rat-faced youth, named Tom Molloy, as desperate a character for his years as one could wish to see.
Moreover, Molloy had no love for Pool Clayton. He had a feeling that Clayton thought himself the better of the two, and it had aroused his dislike and enmity.
“So you’ve come sneakin’ in, have ye?” he sneered, his little eyes gleaming with vindictive animosity. “I shouldn’t think you would, after that!”
Pool Clayton’s face flushed to a deep red, then paled. He had expected to receive the jeers of the outlaws, but it did not please him to have this young fellow begin the thing. Nor did it please him to discover, as he did at once, that Molloy was leader here, in the absence of the chief.
“Where have they gone?” he asked, ignoring Molloy’s words.