“I don’t know. Do you?” she flashed back.
His evil grin derided her. “How would I know, my dear?”
He drew up a chair and sat down. The girl did not move. Rigid and watchful, she did not let her eye waver from him for an instant.
He nodded toward the delirious man. “Will he make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doc seen him yet?”
“No.”
“Glad I came. I can help nurse him.” He cut short a high cackle of laughter to ask a question. “What’s yore gun for, dearie? You wouldn’t throw it on poor Jake Prowers, would you?”
He was as deadly as dynamite, she thought, more treacherous than a rattlesnake. She wanted to cry out her horror at him. To see him sitting there, humped up like a spider, not three feet from the man he had tried to murder, filled her with repulsion. There was more in her feeling than that; a growing paralysis of terror lest he might reach out and in a flash complete the homicide he had attempted.
She tried to reason this away. He dared not do it, with her here as a witness, with two men drawing closer every minute. Don Black had told her that he wouldn’t strike in the open, and the range rider had known him more years than she had lived. But the doubt remained. She did not know what he would do. Since she did not live in the same world as he, it was not possible for her to follow his thought processes.