“I am going to remain here,” Dick said in a low voice. “Right here.”
“Not much!” Nell wheeled to open the door. “I’ll call ’em up. They are watching for you below.”
“Nell!” gasped Betty.
“You better speak for me,” sneered Dick. “I don’t reckon that you two girls will turn me over to the sheriff. Don’t forget, Nellie, that once I was your honey-boy.”
The mining-camp girl’s whole person seemed to fire under this spur. Her face blazed. She was tense with wrath—wrath that she could not for the moment audibly express.
But when she did speak her voice was as hard as ice and her accents as cold:
“Dick Beckworth, you get out of here! March!”
“Not much.”
Nell had been riding. She never went abroad on horseback without wearing her belt and gun. The latter flashed into her hand too quickly for Dick to have again produced his weapon, had he so desired.
“Put ’em up!” was Nell’s concise command. “Don’t flutter a finger wrong. I been thinking for months that I saw you go over that cliff to your death. Maybe I worried some over being the possible cause of your taking that drop. But I feel a whole lot different about you now, Dick Beckworth. Keep your hands up and march out of this room.”