“Not for mine,” said Neil, with an apologetic laugh. “I’m satisfied. I just wanted to know. And I guess Cork corroborates.”
Reilly growled something under his breath, and turned to hulk away.
“One moment. You’ll listen to me, now. You have taken the liberty to assume I was going to sell you out. I’ll not stand that from any man alive. To-morrow night I’ll get back from Tucson. We’ll dig up the loot and divide it. And right then we quit company. You go your way and I go mine.” And with that as a parting shot, Leroy turned on his heel and went direct to his horse.
Alice Mackenzie might have searched the West with a fine-tooth comb and not found elsewhere two such riders for an escort as fenced her that day. Physically they were a pair of superb animals, each perfect after his fashion. If the fair-haired giant, with his lean, broad shoulders and rippling flow of muscles, bulked more strikingly in a display of sheer strength, the sinewy, tigerish grace of the dark Apollo left nothing to be desired to the eye. Both of them had been brought up in the saddle, and each was fit to the minute for any emergency likely to appear.
But on this pleasant morning no test of their power seemed likely to arise, and she could study them at her ease without hindrance. She had never seen Leroy look more the vagabond enthroned. For dress, he wore the common equipment of Cattleland—jingling spurs, fringed chaps, leather cuffs, gray shirt, with kerchief knotted loosely at the neck, and revolver ready to his hand. But he carried them with an air, an inimitable grace, that marked him for a prince among his fellows. Something of the kind she hinted to him in jesting paradoxical fashion, making an attempt to win from his sardonic gloom one of his quick, flashing smiles.
He countered by telling her what he had heard York say to Reilly of her. “She’s a princess, Cork,” York had said. “Makes my Epitaph gyurl look like a chromo beside her. Somehow, when she looks at a fellow, he feels like a whitewashed nigger.”
All of them laughed at that, but both Leroy and the sheriff tried to banter her by insisting that they knew exactly what York meant.
“You can be very splendid when you want to give a man that whitewashed feeling; he isn’t right sure whether he’s on the map or not,” reproached the train-robber.
She laughed in the slow, indolent way she had, taking the straw hat from her dark head to catch better the faint breath of wind that was soughing across the plains.
“I didn’t know I was so terrible. I don’t think you ever had any awe of anybody, Mr. Leroy.” Her soft cheek flushed in unexpected memory of that moment when he had brushed aside all her maiden reserves and ravished mad kisses from her. “And Mr. Collins is big enough to take care of himself,” she added hastily, to banish the unwelcome recollection.