But his questions found an answer much sooner than he expected. The silence was broken by a short, hard laugh of something like self-contempt.
"You an' me, Bill. We're going up there with an outfit that knows all about scrapping, and something about gold. We're going up there, and d'you know why? Oh, not to rob a widow and orphan." He laughed again in the same fashion. "Not a soul's got to know, or be wise to our play," he went on. "The strike they've worked won't be touched by us. We'll make our own. But for once gold isn't all we need. There's something else. I tell you I can't rest till we find it. There's a gal, Bill, on the Snake River, with eyes made to smile most all the time. They did—till Allan Mowbray got done up. Well, I got a notion they'll smile again some day, but it won't be till I've located just how her father came by his end, after years of working with the Bell River neches. I want to see those eyes smile, Bill. I want to see 'em smile bad. Maybe you think me some fool man. I allow I'm wiser than you guess. Maybe, even, I'm wiser than you, who've never yearned to see a gal's eyes smiling into yours in all your forty-three years. That's why we're going to butt in on that strike, and you're coming right along with me if I have to yank you there by your mighty badly fledged scalp."
Bill had turned over on his side. His shrewd eyes were smiling.
"Sounds like fever," he said, in his pleasant way. "I'll need to take the patient's temperature. Say, John, you won't have to haul on my scalp for any play like that. I'm in it—right up to my neck. That I've lived to see the day John Kars talks of marrying makes me feel I've not lived——"
"He's not talking of marriage," came the swift retort with flushed cheeks.
"No. But he's thinking it. Which, in a man like John Kars, comes pretty near meaning the same thing. Did you ask her, boy?"
Just for a moment resentment lit the other's eyes. It was on his tongue to make a sharp retort. But, under the deep, new emotion stirring him, an emotion that made him rather crave for a sympathy which, in all his strong life, he had never felt the necessity before, the desire melted away. In place of it he yielded to a rush of enthusiasm which surprised himself almost as much as it did his old friend.
"No, Bill." He laughed. "I—hadn't the nerve to. I don't know as I'll ever have the nerve to. But I want that little gal bad. I want her so bad I feel I could get right out an' trail around these darnation hills, an' skitter holes, hollering 'help' like some mangy coyote chasing up her young. Oh, I'm going to ask her. I'll have to ask her, if I have to get you to hand me the dope to fix my nerve right. And, say, if she hands me the G. B. for that bladder of taller-fat, Murray, why I'll just pack my traps, and hit the trail for Bell River, and I'll sit around and kill off every darned neche so she can keep right on handing herself all the gold she needs till she's sitting atop of a mountain of it, which is just about where I'd like to set her with these two dirty hands."
His eyes smiled as he held out his hands. But he went on at once.
"Now you've got it all. And I guess we'll let it go at that. You and me, we're going to set right out on this new play. There isn't going to be a word handed to a soul at the Fort, or anywhere else. Not a word. There's things behind Allan Mowbray's death we don't know. But that dirty half-breed knows 'em, if we don't. And the gold on the river has a big stake in the game. That being so, the folk Allan left behind him are to be robbed. Follow it? It kind of seems to me the folk at the Fort are helpless. But—but we aren't. So it's up to me, seeing how I feel about that little gal."