Phil shook his head.
“No!” blurted Brenchfield angrily, “but you prefer to use the cipher note for blackmail and to satisfy your own dirty designs for revenge when your own time comes.”
Phil pointed to the door.
“Get out!––and don’t bring up this subject to me again. I am sick of it––and you.”
Suddenly the Mayor laughed in relief, and he snapped his thumb and forefinger under Phil’s nose.
“Go to it! Do your worst!” he exclaimed. “I’ve found out all I wanted to find. You are an arrant bluffer, Phil Ralston, but you’re not quite smart enough. You haven’t got that note. Damn you!––you never had it for longer time than it took you that morning to burn it.
“It was ashes before the police came.
“Now, Philip Ralston,––it was you who committed the crime you got rightly jailed for. You didn’t get half what was coming to you, dirty thief and blackmailer that you are. You should have had ten years–––”
Brenchfield got no further. Phil was on him quick as an avalanche. The Mayor, in his haste to get out of the way, toppled backward against the anvil. Phil’s left arm shot out and finished the job. He caught Brenchfield straight on the point of the chin, sending him hurtling head first over the anvil and on to the floor on the other side.
Phil vaulted over on top of him, but when he saw the huddled form, limp and insensible, and the face livid and drawn, his better judgment flashed through and mastered his terrible anger. He caught the inert Mayor 280 by the arms, dragged him across the soft flooring of hoof shavings and metal-dust, to the outside, slinging him unceremoniously on to the heap of broken iron beside the frozen horse-trough. He next went back into the smithy, damped down the fires, dipped a pail into the vat––filling it with water––then shut up shop, for it was growing dark and near to the usual closing time. He went into the yard and looked over his still senseless but heavily breathing antagonist. He dashed the icy contents of the pail contemptuously over the head and shoulders of Brenchfield, tossing the empty receptacle on the ground. He next loosened his horse from the stall in the barn, mounted and rode down town to Morrison of the O.K. Supply Company to purchase the balance of the supplies he and Jim required for their next day’s Christmas dinner––their first Christmas dinner on a ranch; Phil’s first Christmas dinner in six outside of a prison.