Julian Marbolt sat thinking for a moment. “Yes, you’re right,” he agreed at last. “We’ll send out extra night guards. And you’d best detail two good, reliable men for a few days at Willow Bluff. Only thoroughly reliable men, mind. You see to it.”
Jake turned to Tresler at once, his face beaming with a malicious grin. And the latter understood. But he was not prepared for the skilful trap which his archenemy was baiting for him, and into which he was to promptly fall.
“How’d it suit you, Tresler?” he asked. Then without waiting for a reply he went on, “But ther’, I guess it wouldn’t do sendin’ you. You ain’t the sort to get scrappin’ hoss thieves. It wants grit. It’s tough work an’ needs tough men. Pshaw!”
Tresler’s blood was up in a moment. He forgot discretion and everything else under the taunt.
“I don’t know that it wouldn’t do, Jake,” he retorted promptly. “It seems to me your remarks come badly from a man who has reason to know—to remember—that I am capable of holding my own with most men, even those big enough to eat me.”
He saw his blunder even while he was speaking. But he was red-hot with indignation and didn’t care a jot for the consequences. And Jake came at him. If the foreman’s taunt had roused him, it was nothing to the effect of his reply. Jake crossed the room in a couple of strides and his furious face was thrust close into Tresler’s, and, in a voice hoarse with passion, he fairly gasped at him—
“I ain’t fergot. An’ by G——”
But he got no further. A movement on the part of the rancher interrupted him. Before he realized what was happening the blind man was at his side with a grip on his arm that made him wince.
“Stop it!” he cried fiercely. “Stop it, you fool! Another word and, blind as I am, I’ll——” Jake struggled to release himself, but Marbolt held him with almost superhuman strength and slowly backed him from his intended victim. “Back! Do you hear? I’ll have no murder done in here—unless I do it myself. Get back—back, blast you!” And Jake was slowly, in spite of his continued struggles, thrust against the wall. And then, as he still resisted, Marbolt pushed the muzzle of a revolver against his face. “I’ll drop you like a hog, if you don’t——”