Then, and for the first time, Big George noticed the Sergeant’s mount. Speechless for the moment, he stood, pop-eyed, gaping stupidly.
“Look, look!” he ejaculated to his partner in distress, “why, that’s Shorty’s—” his voice failed him.
“Eyah! That’s what put th’ kibosh on me,” commiserated poor Scotty feelingly. “He must ha’ corralled him, too, an’ th’ ——’s given us away. Must have—who else could ha’ put this feller onta us?”
Ellis, in his own saturnine fashion, chuckled grimly at this last remark. “Sure,” he said, “that’s what. Now, yu’ fellers climb up pronto. I ain’t a-goin’ to hang around here all night.”
In dismal silence they obeyed resignedly, and the grim little procession eventually reached the detachment. Wearily they dismounted, and the Sergeant drew Gallagher aside.
“Yu’ go on in first Barney,” he whispered. “Light th’ lamp, an’ wake th’ old feller I told yu’ about. Tell him to go an’ camp in th’ kitchen for th’ night—I’ll bring him in some blankets, later. I don’t want them fellers to see him.”
The other, nodding silently, entered the building, and soon a light shone through the open door. Presently he came out again.
“All set,” he said.
The Sergeant then proceeded to usher in his prisoners and, after leg-ironing them together, with a significant gesture handed the key over to Gallagher. Seen in the light the two rustlers presented a grotesquely dissimilar appearance.
Big George fully justified his soubriquet. Standing nearly six feet two, his enormous breadth of shoulder and hairy, barrel-like chest which the torn shirt revealed seemed, somehow, though, to detract from his actual height. His age might have been forty or thereabouts. On some physiognomies evil passions have imprinted their danger signals unmistakably. Fisk’s sinister countenance, with its somber, desperate eyes and bushy tangle of coal-black beard which hid, one instinctively guessed, a cruel mouth and a terrible, animal-like jaw, might to many imaginations have found its prototype in the ruthless visage of a moss-trooping cattle-reiver of the Middle Ages captured, perchance, in some Border night foray.