The fugitive stopped a few yards from Prowers and eyed him suspiciously. “Wotcha want to chew the rag about?” he asked.
Jake sat down on a rock with an air so casually careless that a tenderfoot might not have guessed that he was ready for instant action if need be.
“Fellow, sit down,” he said. “We got all day before us. I don’t reckon you got any engagements you have to keep immediate—not since you had that one at the Diamond Bar K ranch last night.”
“I don’t getcha.”
“Sure you do. No use throwin’ a sandy with me. I tell you, fellow, I’m playin’ my own hand. Me, I don’t like Reed any more’n you do. So, entrey noo, as the frog-eaters say, we’ll take it for granted you were the uninvited guest at Reed’s ranch a few hours since. Yore work wasn’t first-class, if you ask old Jake Prowers. You didn’t burn but a small part of the wheat and you didn’t get Clint anyways adequate.”
“Meaning he wasn’t croaked?” Cig demanded out of the corner of his mouth.
“I’ll say he wasn’t, by jiminy by jinks. But I don’t know as that’ll help you any when his boys catch you.”
“They ain’t gonna catch me,” the New York crook boasted, his brain seething with suspicion of the dried-up little man in front of him.
Jake Prowers weighed this, a skeptical smile on his thin lips. “Interesting, but unreliable,” he decided aloud, in regard to the other’s prediction. “How do you aim to prevent it? The sheriff has got you cut off from the railroad. Food don’t grow on bushes in these hills. You’re done, unless—”
“You gotta ’nother guess coming,” the thug retorted. “Forget that stuff. I ain’t no hobo. Come to a showdown these country boobs’ll find me right there with a gun. I’m a good man to lay off.”