“There aire more of our crowd, and our kind, out here some’eres,” said Denton’s companion. “And I’m fer signalin’ to them.”
“It will draw the attention of the road agents, if they’re near.”
“Well, what if it does? I’d like to bring a little rain. This country is more droughted up than the desert of Sahiry. And that’s what brung me to Scarlet Gulch, ye know, as I’ve been tellin’ ye, the droughty condition out here. Says I to myself, ‘If I can go out there and bring rain, it means the biggest kind of big money in my pocket.’”
He had slipped from his saddle, and was helping the young man to dismount.
When Denton was on the ground, and had groped his way weakly to the foot of the tree, where he dropped down with a sigh of relief, Silas Deland turned his attention to a “grip,” or hand bag, of queer make, which he had hung at the horn of his saddle. He set this on the ground by the tree; and then, dropping down by the side of Denton, he opened it.
“I was tellin’ ye about that,” he said, “and about the luck I had over in Arizony. Well, the land is that dry and burned up in Arizony that men are compelled to drink whisky because there ain’t water enough to go round.”
He sprung open the bag, and within lay a number of small, egg-shaped, white objects.
The spy in the tree craned his neck to see them, and stared with popping eyes. At first he thought they were eggs. But, when Deland took one of them out and began to talk about it, the spy discovered his mistake.
“It’s this way,” said Deland, turning the white object around in his fingers, handling it as gingerly as if it were an egg and he feared to break it; “this land out here is the driest part of creation. The last good rain was, I reckon, when Noah had his flood and the mountains became seas.
“It was funny”—he turned the egg-shaped thing around in his fingers again—“the way them scalawags humped when I pitched one of these things into the midst of ’em there in Scarlet Gulch; they thought they’d been dynamited.” He chuckled so much that for a second or two he could not go on. “But it was harmless—perfectly harmless—unless a man should get some of the fire in his hair, or in his skin, or on his clothing, and then it might burn him some. Otherwise, it was perfectly harmless. But you saw it! And did you ever see so small an object made so much fire and smoke? And didn’t that gang of vigilantes fall all over themselves in trying to get out of the way? But perfectly harmless—perfectly harmless!”