Merrick looked him over more carefully. “College man?”
“Massachusetts Tech.”
“My name’s Merrick.”
The stranger hesitated a fraction of a second. “You can call me Jones.”
“One of my men quit yesterday. Would you care to take a try at it? It’s cement work.”
The man who had given his name as Jones was suffering the tortures of the damned. He wanted a shot in the arm to lift him out of himself, and he had thrown away his supply of the drug. Just now everything else in the world was unimportant beside this ravenous craving that filled his whole being.
“I’d just as soon,” he said without enthusiasm.
Ten minutes later he sat beside Merrick in the runabout. The car was taking the stiff grade of the road which climbed the Flat Tops to the hills.
CHAPTER XIV
ONE BAD HOMBRE MEETS ANOTHER
Old Jake Prowers looked grimly down upon the Flat Tops from the Notch. He could see the full stretch of the mesa and below it one end of Paradise Valley. The windmill of the Diamond Bar K was shining in the sun, miles away, flinging out heliographic signals that conformed to no man-made code.