"Don't!"
He was abashed, and for a moment neither said a word.
"What is the combination?" he finally asked hoarsely.
"I promised Mr. Barsdale never to tell any one." Her lips wreathed into a little smile. "I'll do it myself."
"No, you won't." Wade shook his head positively. "Do you suppose I'm going to let you steal for me? It will be bad enough to do it myself; but necessity knows no law. Well, we'll let it go for the present then. Don't you think of doing it, Dorothy. Will you promise me?"
"I never promise," she said, smiling again, and ignoring her last words in womanly fashion, "but if you don't want me to...."
"Well, I don't," he declared firmly. "Let it rest at that. We'll probably find some other way anyhow."
She asked him then about Santry, but he evaded a direct answer beyond expressing the conviction that everything would end all right. They talked for a while of commonplaces, although nothing that he said seemed commonplace to her and nothing that she said seemed so to him. When it was fully dark he arose to go. Then she seemed a little sorry that she had not let him put his arm around her, and she leaned toward him as she had done on the trail; but he was not well versed in woman's subtleties, and he failed to guess her thoughts and walked away, leaving her, as Shakespeare put it, to
"Twice desire, ere it be day, That which with scorn she put away."
Having mounted his horse at the livery stable, he first made sure that the extra horse was behind the school-house, where he tied his own, and then walked around to the jail. On the outside, this building was a substantial log structure; within, it was divided into the Sheriff's office and sleeping room, the "bull pen," and a single narrow cell, in which Wade guessed that Santry would be locked. After examining his revolver, he slipped it into the side pocket of his coat and walked boldly up to the jail. Then, whistling merrily, for Bat Lewis, the deputy, was a confirmed human song-bird, he knocked sharply on the door with his knuckles.