CHAPTER XXIV.
ON THE WAY TO MEDICINE BLUFF.
“What do you fellows mean by trying to cut me out like this?” cried Reginald de Bray, as he spurred alongside the scout and his pards. There was more of jest than rebuke in his voice, however, as became apparent when he added: “You know, I’m in on this deal to the tune of twenty thousand.”
“Well, De Bray,” laughed the scout, “I had supposed that maybe that lump on the back of your head was giving you trouble, and that you were willing to trust me to look after your twenty thousand and stay in Sun Dance along with Hotchkiss and Pete.”
“It was a stiff blow I got on the back of my head, but it wasn’t hard enough to knock me out of a picnic like this.”
“This won’t be much of a picnic,” said Wild Bill, with a sarcastic look at the Denver man’s clothes. “You look like you were got up for a hoe down.”
“Bother the clothes!” exclaimed De Bray; “the time was short, and I couldn’t change them. I bought this gun and forty rounds”—he slapped his new rifle and the ammunition-belt at his waist—“and then went with a man to buy this horse. All that was necessary, of course, and while I was about it you fellows came within one of giving me the slip. Here I am, though, with one eye out for trouble and the other scanning the hazy distance for my lost dinero. Lawless overlooked my watch during that double mix-up we had with him, and I had to pledge it for the gun, the ammunition, the horse, and the riding-gear.”
“You needn’t have done that, De Bray,” said the scout. “You could have had the outfit charged to me.”
“Didn’t have time to think of that,” caroled the Denver man blithely.
“You act,” said Wild Bill, somewhat mystified by the way the Denver man carried himself, “as though losing twenty thousand was an every-day affair with you.”
“If I do, then I’m acting a whole lot different from what I feel. Twenty thousand is quite a bunch of money, but if I never saw it again it wouldn’t break me.”