"Well, supposing the young devil did break loose. What of it? How about this pard bunk? That's what I want to know."
"I fear that Miss Farley has found me rather a disappointment," put in Lennon, and he looked at his trussed arm.
"Not at all—just the other way 'round," Carmena glowingly asserted. "Figure it out for yourself, Mr. Slade. A man who could follow up a Gila monster bite by outrunning Cochise and his bunch across the Basin, and then make them back up. Can you wonder I think he's a man for us to tie to?"
"If we needed a new pard," qualified Slade. "Fact is, we don't, and you know it. We got enough a'ready to do the work and split up our profits."
Carmena cast a significant glance toward Elsie, who had ventured back to renew the fire in her oven.
"How about Cochise getting out of hand? All the time it's harder to hold him. He's beginning to bristle up even to you."
Slade's tobacco-stained teeth showed in a grin of contemptuous indifference.
"Bah. I'll pull his head off if he gits sassy, and he knows it."
"Of course. He'd have no show—unless a pot-shot or a knife in your back—— If only he was white!"
"Surely you do not mean to say, Miss Farley, that Cochise would attack his own partner," Lennon backed up the girl's play. "I saw him pull out that long knife of his under the table, but imagined it was merely the Indian way of easing his feelings against Mr. Slade."