“Well, he’s a borderman, a sort of renegade, I take it. Barlow was going to have Smallpox Dave slip over into the Moonlight Mountains and there start the initial trouble which was to give him an excuse for being sent there. So he had some talk with Dave; and then, later, wrote him a letter. At the time he wrote that letter he wrote another.”
“To Smallpox Dave?”
“No, to a girl named May Arlington, who lives out on the prairie here with her father. Barlow is in love with the girl, but he didn’t get on well with her; and this letter had something to do with that. She turned him down a week or so ago.”
“From what you have told me of him I judge she did the right thing.”
“Yes, she did. But about these letters. I was to be the messenger who was to carry them.”
“Then you were in the thing, too?” said the scout, looking hard at him.
Wilkins turned toward him, trembling and white-faced.
“Yes,” he admitted, “I was. I had got down that low, by degrees. I tried to tell you about it, and how it started in my gambling mania and the debt I owed him. I was helping him in this thing; or, rather, was running some errands for him in connection with it.”
“And if those gold nuggets of the medicine man were secured I suppose you were to have had some of them?”
“No; not so far as I know. Barlow made no promises to me. He said he wanted me to help him; and—well, I had so far weakened, under the threats of disgrace he held over me, that lately I had taken to doing anything he told me to, without stopping to ask questions about it. And so I was to carry those letters. They were left on a table by Barlow, who had been called from his room in a hurry. I got them mixed; and the letter with the nugget, intended for Smallpox Dave, I threw out to the girl as I passed the house where she lives. And the other letter I carried on to Smallpox Dave—the letter which rightly belonged to the girl.”