So saying, Dan Slike turned his head slightly and spat accurately through the open draft into the stove. An engaging gentleman, Mr. Slike!
"I saw two mules and a horse in the corral when I came by," he resumed, dandling the whisky bottle on his knee. "Looks like a good horse—better than the one I left up in the timber. I'll ride your horse and lead the other. Where do you keep your saddle and bridle? In the shed, huh? Aw right, you can show me when we go out. Listen, I expect to-morrow some time you'll have a few gents a-callin' on you. Yeah, to-morrow. It'll likely take those Golden Bar citizens till about then to pick up my trail. You needn't to look too hopeful. Those jiggers don't know they're alive. I saw 'em scatterin' off hell-bent the wrong way before I ever started this way, you bet. Why, hells bells, I even topped a horse behind a corral with the woman right in the house gettin' supper, and she never knowed it. Tell you, girl, I'm slick. And if I didn't have more sense in the tip of my finger than all those fellers and their li'l tin sheriff and his li'l tin deputies, I'd be a heap ashamed of myself. Say—about that sheriff; I heard folks talkin' in the street this afternoon and they said the sheriff had skedaddled because he'd murdered a sport named O'Gorman. A fi-ine sheriff he is, to slop around turnin' tricks like that. A fi-ine sheriff, and you can tell him I said so."
He drove in the cork with the heel of his hand and slipped the bottle into a side pocket of his coat. Standing up, he tapped her smartly on the shoulder. "Get me that hat over there on the hook. I left town in such a hurry I clean forgot to fetch mine along."
Silently she brought the hat.
"Why do you women always wear hats too big for you?" he grumbled, after trying it on. "I couldn't keep this thing on my head."
She had brought an Omaha newspaper from town that day. It lay outspread on the table. He tore off a half page, plaited it neatly and stuffed the thickened strip in behind the sweatband of the hat.
"It will fit me now," he said briskly, pulling on the hat. "Gimme those cantenas and saddle pockets hanging on the wall."
She obeyed stumblingly. Into the cantenas, from her store of provisions, he packed bacon, coffee, a sack of flour a third full, a tin can full of salt, another can filled with matches, a salt pack full of sugar, several cans of tomatoes and peaches, a frying-pan and a small can of lard. In the saddle pockets he stowed away the twelve boxes of rifle cartridges, the six boxes of revolver cartridges and a knife, fork and spoon. The long-bladed butcher knife he nonchalantly slipped down his boot-leg.
"I'll tie the coffee pot on the saddle," he said, buckling the billet of a cantena flap. "It's too wet to go in here. Can't take a chance on spoiling my flour. C'mon, le's go find the saddle."