“You going with me clear to the edge of town?”
“No. Just across the square, where it’s light an’ there are liable to be people. You’ll have to look out for yourself after that. It’s not more than two hundred yards to the sagebrush.”
“I’m ready whenever you are,” he said.
June put on her shoes and did up her hair.
She made him wait there while she scouted to make sure nobody was in the corridor outside the room.
They passed out of the back door of the hotel.
Chung met them. He grunted “Glood-eveling” with a grin at June, but he did not glance twice at her companion.
The two passed across a vacant lot and into the park. They saw one or two people—a woman with a basket of eggs, a barefoot boy returning home from after-supper play. June carried the burden of the talk because she was quicker-witted than Houck. Its purpose was to deceive anybody who might happen to be looking at them.
It chanced that some one was looking at them. He was a young man who had been lying on the grass stargazing. They passed close to him and he recognized June by her walk. That was not what brought him to his feet a moment later with a gasp of amazement. He had recognized her companion, too, or he thought he had. It was not credible, of course. He must be mistaken. And yet—if that was not Jake Houck’s straddling slouch his eyes were playing tricks. The fellow limped, too, just a trifle, as he had heard the Brown’s Park man did from the effects of his wounds in the Ute campaign.
But how could Houck be with June, strolling across the park in intimate talk with her, leaning toward her in that confidential, lover-like attitude—Jake Houck, who had robbed the bank a few hours earlier and was being hunted up and down the river by armed posses ready to shoot him like a wolf? June was a good hater. She had no use whatever for this fellow. Why, then, would she be with him, laughing lightly and talking with animation?