“You’d better pray they won’t. For if they find the nest it will be empty.”
“Yes?” Luck spoke with ironical carelessness, but he shot an alert keen glance at the other.
“That’s what I said. Want to know where you will be?” the other triumphed.
“I see you want to tell me. Unload your mind.”
Triumph overrode discretion. “Look out of that window behind you.”
Luck turned. The cabin was built on a ledge far up on the mountain side. From the back wall sloped for a hundred feet an almost perpendicular slide of rock.
“There’s a prospect hole down there,” Blackwell explained savagely. “You’d go down the Devil’s Slide—what’s left of you, I mean—deep into that prospect hole. The timberings are rotted and the whole top of the working ready to cave in. When your body hits it there will be an avalanche—with Mr. Former-sheriff Cullison at the bottom of it. You’ll be buried without any funeral expenses, and I reckon your friends will never know where to put the headstone.”
The thing was devilishly simple and feasible. Luck, still looking out of the window, felt the blood run cold down his spine, for he knew this fellow would never stick at murder if he felt it would be safe. No doubt he was being well paid, and though in this workaday world revenge has gone out of fashion there was no denying that this ruffian would enjoy evening the score. But his confederate was of another stripe, a human being with normal passions and instincts. The cattleman wondered how he could reconcile it to his conscience to go into so vile a plot with a villain like the convict.
“So you see I’m right; you’d better pray your friends won’t find you. They can’t reach here without being heard. If they get to hunting these hills you sure want to hope they’ll stay cold, for just as soon as they get warm it will be the signal for you to shoot the chutes.”
Luck met his triumphant savagery with an impassive face. “Interesting if true. And where will you be when my friends arrive. I reckon it won’t be a pleasant meeting for Mr. Blackwell.”