“He’ll not come back tonight, Sleepy. He’s high-tailin’ it out of this section right now. I’ll betcha yuh could hear that explosion in Blue Wells.”
Marion shivered in the cold breeze, as she looked at the moonlit wreck.
“Oh, what will happen next?” she wondered aloud.
“Somebody,” said Hashknife, “is goin’ to hear the echo of that blast, and it sure is goin’ to ache his ears.”
They tried to find their bed-rolls, but the outer wall of the bunk-house, which was about two feet thick of adobe, had fallen in on the floor, and it would require much digging to get down even to the bunk-levels.
They went after their horses and put them in the stable, after which they borrowed a few blankets from Marion. Jimmy insisted that he be allowed to stand guard with them, but Hashknife decreed that Jimmy sleep in the house, while Sleepy rolled in his blankets at the hay-mow window of the stable, which, since the bunk-house was no more, gave him a fair view of the patio and rear of the house. Hashknife went out about a hundred feet from the front of the house, and coiled up in his blankets in the cover of a mesquite, where he could watch the front of the ranch-house. But nothing came, except the cold, gray dawn, which was a long time coming.
There was an exodus from Blue Wells, when the news of the dynamiting reached there, and the Double Bar 8 held a great gathering of the cattle-clan, who came to view the ruins and to give an opinion. Some of them seemed to think that perhaps Apostle Paul Taylor had had some dynamite stored in the bunk-house, and that it had exploded.
Tex Alden came and viewed the ruins with gloomy eyes; Barnhardt perched on a pile of adobe and crumbled the clay between his fingers, and looked wise. The sheriff talked to every one who seemed to have any kind of a theory—and knew no more about it than he did when he came.
The women grouped around Marion, and “Oh’d” and “Ah’d,” like a lot of old hens clucking over a sudden fright. Hashknife said nothing, but listened much. Le Moyne came to him and tried to find out what Hashknife thought about it, but went away with the feeling that this tall cowboy knew less than any of them.
With Le Moyne was Dug Haley, who quarreled loudly with Al Porter over what dynamite would or would not do. Sleepy Stevens horned into the argument with a dissertation on “the dynamic principles of combustion,” in which he used the words “epiglottis,” “atomizer” and “dogmatic” numberless times; much to the confusion of Al Porter, who was forced to admit that all he knew about dynamite was that “the —— stuff busts and raises ——.”