For answer, Spangler, with an oath, seized him by the collar and jerked him roughly out of the tonneau.
Matt was unable to make any resistance. As he stood in the road, the jagged uplifts by which he was surrounded seemed to swim about him in circles.
Spangler got back in the car, as Matt staggered to a big boulder and leaned against it, and Brisco backed the car around until it was headed along the back course.
"Wait!" cried Matt, as a thought of what all this might mean to him took shape in his brain.
"We're going to wait—and for just about a minute," returned Brisco.
"Are you going to steal that car?" asked Matt, "just as you stole Nugent's?"
"You're too much of a meddler," snapped Brisco. "If you could go along and mind your own business, you'd be a whole lot better off. You had to tangle up with Tomlinson, back there at Ash Fork, and you hadn't any call to butt in. If it hadn't been for you, we'd 'a' won out on that game and been all to the good. I don't reckon we'd have bothered you at all, though, if you'd been content to carry out your orders and push on to Albuquerque. But you couldn't do that; oh, no. You're trying to be first aid to the weak and down-trodden wherever you run into them, so you had to mix up with that bunch of stranded actors.
"When I drove the runabout into Fairview after gasoline and oil, I dropped Spangler off to lay for the tramps and get that tin box. You had to butt in, as per usual. I got away from Fairview by the skin of my teeth, picked up Spang at the place where he was waiting, and we went on to where our other pard had some horses. We side-tracked the runabout there, and slid back toward Fairview, intending to push through the timber—a move we couldn't make in the car. Then"—and here a swirling oath dropped from Brisco's lips—"we dropped into your little trap."
"What trap?" demanded Matt.
"Oh, no, you don't know a thing about that, do you? You weren't moseying out there just to give us a chance to lift that tin box, were you? And you hadn't the least notion it was empty, had you? If you hadn't turned that trick, my bantam, we wouldn't have turned this one. We're going to settle with you, all right. This is a part of the country that isn't traveled once a week, and you're seventy-five miles from Fairview. By the time you get back to town, we'll have got what was in that box, and have smashed the Red Flier into a heap of jack-straws. I know a nice little cliff alongside the road, and when we're through with the car we'll lash the wheel, open her up and let her go over the edge! I reckon that'll cook your goose with Tomlinson. He didn't calculate you were going to use his car transporting a lot of stranded actors, and mixing up in their affairs on the way to Albuquerque."