He was eying the spoke in Buck’s clutch.
“What did you steal her for, Brick Avery?”
“There isn’t anything sure about her going away with me,” the other protested.
Buck yanked away another spoke in his vehemence.
“Don’t you lie to me,” he bawled. “There wasn’t telegraphs and telephones and railroads handy in them days, so that I could stop you or catch you, but I didn’t need any telegraphs to tell me she had gone away with handsome Mounseer Hercules, of the curly hair.” He snorted the sobriquet with bitter spite. “A girl I’d took off’n the streets and made the champion lady rider of—and was going to marry, and thought more of, damn yeh, than I did of all the rest of the world! What did ye do with her?”
“Well, she wanted to go along, and so I took her aboard. She seemed to want to get away from your show, near as I could find out.” The giant hugged his knees together and blinked appealingly.
“It must be a bang-up living you’re giving her,” sneered Buck, running his eye over the equipage. In his passion he forgot the lapse of the years and the possibility of changes.
“Seems as if you hadn’t heard the latest news,” broke in Avery, his face suddenly clearing of the puckers of apprehension. “She never stuck to me no time. She didn’t intend to. She just made believe that she was going to marry me so that I would take her along. She run away with the sixteen hundred dollars I had saved up and Signor Dellabunko—or something like that—who was waiting for her on the road, and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of ’em since, nor I don’t want to, and I’ve still got the letter that she left me, so that I can prove what I say. She was going to do the same thing to you, she said in it, but she had made up her mind that she couldn’t work you so easy. It’s all in that letter! Kind of a kick-you-and-run letter!”
In his agitation Buck broke another spoke from the crumbling wheel. The parrot cracked his beak against the cage’s bars and yawled:
“It’s the old army game, gents!”