The little man grinned with broken-toothed malevolence at his henchman.
“I don’t aim to lay for Clint,” growled Black. He was not a humorist and he never knew when Prowers’s jokes were loaded with dynamite.
Jake cackled. “O’ course not. Clint, he’s a good citizen if he did kick you off’n the Diamond Bar K once. What’s a li’l’ thing like that between friends.”
“I don’t claim him as any friend of mine. If you ask me, he’s too dawg-goned bossy—got to have everything his own way. But that ain’t sayin’ I got any notion of layin’ in the brush for him. Not so any one could notice it. If Clint lives till I bump him off, he’ll sure be a Methuselah,” Black answered sulkily.
“That’s fine,” jeered the cattleman. “I’ll tell Clint to quit worryin’ about you—that you ain’t got a thing against him. Everything’s lovely, even if he did kick you around some.”
The rider flushed darkly. “He ain’t worryin’ none about me, an’ I didn’t say everything was lovely. I like him same as I do a wolf. But all I ask is for him to let me alone. If he does that, we’ll not tangle.”
On the breeze there came to them from far to the left a faint booming. Prowers looked toward the rocky escarpment back of which lay the big dam under construction.
The wrinkled, leathery face told no tales. “Still blasting away on his dinged dam project. That fellow Merrick is either plumb fool or else we are. I got to find out which.”
“I reckon he can’t make water run uphill,” the dark man commented.
“No, Don. But maybe he doesn’t have to do that. Maybe the Government engineers are wrong. I’ll admit that don’t look reasonable to me. They put it down in black and white—three of ’em, one after another—that Elk Creek Cañon is higher at the far end than this dam site of his. They dropped the scheme because it wasn’t feasible. Probably Merrick’s one of these squirts that know it all. Still—” The sentence died out, but the man’s thoughts raced on.