"Hmp!" Harrison took time for reflection. "Know where I put up?"
"Si, señor."
The prizefighter gave him a dollar. "Stay here. Keep an eye on that lighted window upstairs. If anything happens—if you hear a noise—if a woman screams, come and knock me up right away. Understand?"
The docile Cabenza repeated his instructions like a parrot.
"Good enough," Harrison nodded. "I'll give you another dollar when you come. But don't wake me for nothing."
"No, señor."
"And you'd better keep your mouth shut unless you want your head beat off," advised the white man as he left.
The one who had given his name as Cabenza grinned to himself. He was now Harrison's hired watcher. Both of them were in league to frustrate any deviltry on the part of Pasquale. He wondered what the prizefighter would give to know that he had his enemy so wholly in his power, that he had only to lay hands on him and cry out to doom him to a painful and a violent death.
Yeager dozed and wakened and dozed again. Always when he looked the light was still burning. Toward morning he saw the figure of Ruth in the window. When she turned away the light went out. He judged she had put her anxieties from her and given herself to sleep at last. But not until the camp began to stir with the renewal of life for another day did he leave his post and return to the stable.
During the morning he slept under a cottonwood and made up arrears of rest lost while on guard. About noon Harrison came down the street and stopped at sight of him. The man was livid with anger. Yeager could guess the reason. He had spent a stormy ten minutes with old Pasquale demanding his rights and had issued from the encounter without profit. From the place where Steve was sitting he had heard the high, excited voices. It had occurred to him that the protest of Harrison had gone about as far as it could be safely carried, for Gabriel was both a ruthless and a hot-tempered despot.