Tesno motioned to the men to move around the boiler so it would shield them from the rifleman. As he did so, another bullet made a little explosion of dust two yards below him. He turned his eyes toward the butte and said, "He saw what happened. He's out for blood now."
Rejack bustled up, red-faced and wild-eyed with anger. He took a quick look at the dead man and seemed to grow calmer. He said, "We can't hitch up till that murdering devil stops shooting. Aren't you going after him?"
"I think I know where he'll head for," Tesno said. "I can get there first, I guess. Maybe I can take this one alive."
He strode down-grade to his horse and headed over the hill in the direction of the hidden cabin. He followed the same course he and Charlie had taken that morning, annoyed at its tedious winding and thinking that there might be a shorter way.
When he was near the cabin, he hid his horse well back in the woods and approached on foot.
Everything was just as he had left it. He closed the door behind him and sat down to wait, rifle on his knees. His lack of sleep caught up with him now, and several times in the space of a few minutes he got up to stretch and move about to ward off drowsiness. He couldn't get the dead man out of his mind. He was reasonably sure he had never seen the face before; yet something about that figure sprawled out on the hillside nagged him.
His eye fell on two canvas bags of supplies resting against the wall. And it all came to him then. Two bags of supplies. Two men. One in woolly chaps. The dead man and Jim Palma were the pair he had seen come out of the back of the townhouse two days ago! It seemed a long guess, on the face of it; yet he was sure.
All right, he told himself. They came out of the far end of the building, the office end. That means that Sam Lester is involved, not Persia.
But why Sam? What did he have to gain by wrecking Ben Vickers' boiler? A little longer life for the town, no doubt. But Persia would profit by that as much as Sam. And it was after the men had left that she had suggested a picnic....
There was the soft sound of hoofs outside. He rose and moved quietly to one side of the door. A saddle creaked as a man dismounted. The door was pushed quietly open.