"Come with me," he said abruptly. "I want you to look after this fellow—you're my deputy till further notice." He did not waste time over oaths or official nonsense.
"Now, see here—" the man started to say. But Borden cut him off with a scowl.
"Who is he?" I asked.
"Him?—Fitch. You've heard of him, I guess."
Heard of him, of course, as everyone had; of his sly, petty legal tricks by which he grabbed land here and land there until his titles spotted the country about Nebraska City; of his rent-squeezing that smelled over the whole town; of these, and other things. He was a lean, dark, uneasy fellow, wearing a rumpled tile and a shiny coat, riding all crouched up, and pulling his horse away from everybody we met.
After we started, Borden told me that Fitch had brought him notice to serve on Dempster—old John Dempster, his friend. Now, that made a bad job for the Marshal. I saw it from the way he answered not a word to Fitch, who now and then pressed up—intent on the business—to make him talk. Once Borden pulled out his heavy wrinkled boot from the stirrup and kicked the other's horse in the belly until it reared on its haunches. For Borden was the law's officer, but no man's servant.
Our way ran three miles up from Kinton. There was no road, and we followed along the edge of the bluffs as best we were able, until finally we dipped down into a ravine and so came to our destination. It was a wooded flat on the bank of the river, made by a sudden retreat of the hills—a sort of pocket. The space was not large, a handful of acres, and it looked smaller than it really was. The bluffs curved around it on three sides in a yellow, crumbling wall; on the fourth flowed the muddy waters of the Missouri. The house was in the center of a small clearing, and when we came in sight of it Fitch pulled up behind a small thicket of scrub. Borden, as if he never saw the fellow halt, rode straight up to the door where John Dempster sat shaping an axe-haft.
"Jack," said Borden, swinging down from his saddle, "I've come to have a talk with you."
Dempster shaved the haft a minute, laid it aside, and gazed off toward the clump of scrub. The two men were something alike, though the man seated on the door-sill was the older, both past the prime, both spare of words, both come to the West in the same year. They had lain side by side behind a sleety log before Fort Donelson, and each in his three years of service had felt the touch of hot lead.
"How d'you come—friend or enemy?"